Dictatorship vs. Democracy

Dictatorship vs.
Democracy, by Leon Trotsky 1
Dictatorship vs. Democracy, by Leon

Trotsky
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Title: Dictatorship vs. Democracy (Terrorism and Communism)
Author: Leon Trotsky
Release Date: February 25, 2012 [EBook #38982]
Language: English
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Dictatorship vs. Democracy, by Leon Trotsky 2
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WORKERS PARTY LIBRARY, Vol. I
DICTATORSHIP vs. DEMOCRACY
(TERRORISM AND COMMUNISM)
A Reply to Karl Kautsky by LEON TROTSKY
With a Preface by H. N. BRAILSFORD and Foreword by Max Bedact
[Illustration: WORKERS PARTY OF AMERICA. WORKERS OF THE

WORLD UNITE.]
Published 1922 by WORKERS PARTY OF AMERICA 799 Broadway, Room

405 New York City
CONTENTS
FOREWORD V
PREFACE XI
INTRODUCTION 5
THE BALANCE OF POWER 12
THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT 20
DEMOCRACY 28
TERRORISM 48
THE PARIS COMMUNE AND SOVIET RUSSIA 69
MARX AND ... KAUTSKY 91
THE WORKING CLASS AND ITS SOVIET POLICY 98
PROBLEMS OF THE ORGANIZATION OF LABOR 128
KARL KAUTSKY, HIS SCHOOL AND HIS BOOK 177
IN PLACE OF AN EPILOGUE 188
Foreword
By MAX BEDACT
In a land where "democracy" is so deeply entrenched as in our United States of

America it may seem futile to try to make friends for a dictatorship, by a close
comparison of the principles of the two--Dictatorship versus Democracy. But
then, confiding in the inviting gesture of the Goddess of Liberty many of our
friends and fellow citizens have tested that sacred principle of democracy,
freedom of speech, a little too freely--and landed in the penitentiary for it. Others
again, relying on the not less sacred principle of democracy, freedom of
assembly, have come in unpleasant contact with a substantial stick of hardwood,
wielded by an unwieldily guardian of the law, and awoke from the immediate
effects of this collision in some jail. Again others, leaning a little too heavily
against the democratic principle of freedom of press broke down that pasteboard
pillar of democracy, and incidentally into prison.
Looking at this side of the bright shining medal of our beloved democracy it
seems that there is not the slightest bit of difference between the democracy of
capitalist America and the dictatorship of Soviet Russia. But there is a great
difference. The dictatorship in Russia is bold and upright class rule, which has as
its ultimate object the abolition of all class rule and all dictatorships. Our
democracy, on the other hand, is a Pecksniffian Dictatorship, is hypocrisy
incarnate, promising all liberty in phrases, but in reality even penalizing free
thinking, consistently working only for one object: to perpetuate the rule of the
capitalist class, the capitalist dictatorship.
"Dictatorship versus Democracy" is, therefore, enough of an open question even

in our own country to deserve some consideration. To give food for thought on
this subject is the object of the publication of Trotsky's book.
This book is an answer to a book by Karl Kautsky, "Terrorism and

Communism." It is polemical in character. Polemical writings are, as a rule, only
thoroughly understood if one reads both sides of the question. But even if we
could not take for granted that the proletarian reader is fully familiar with the
question at issue we could not conscientiously advise a worker to get Kautsky's
book. It is really asking our readers to undertake the superhuman task of reading
a book which in the guise of a scientific treatise is foully hitting him below the
belt, and then expect him to pay two dollars for it in the bargain.
Anyhow, to read Kautsky's book is an ordeal for any revolutionist. Kautsky, in

his book, tries to prove that the humanitarian instincts of the masses must defeat
any attempt to overpower and suppress the bourgeoisie by terrorist means. But to
read his book must kill in the proletarian reader the last remnants of those
instincts on which Kautsky's hope for the safety of the bourgeoisie is based.
There would even not be enough of those instincts left to save Kautsky from the
utter contempt of the proletarian masses, a fate he so richly deserves.
Mr. Kautsky was once the foremost exponent of Marxism. Many of those
fighting to-day in the front ranks of the proletarian army revered Kautsky as
their teacher. But even in his most glorious days as a Marxist his was the musty
pedantry of the German professor, which was hardly ever penetrated by a live
spark of revolutionary spirit. Still, the Russian revolution of 1905 found a friend
in him. That revolution did not commit the unpardonable sin of being successful.
But when the tornado of the first victorious proletarian revolution swept over
Russia and destroyed in its fury some of the tormentors and exploiters of the
working class--then Kautsky's "humanitarianism" killed the last remnant of
revolutionary spirit and instinct in him and left only a pitiful wreck of an
apologist for capitalism, that was once Kautsky, the Marxist.
July, 1914. The echoes of the shots fired in Sarajewo threaten to set the world in
flames. Will it come, the seeming inevitable? No!--A thousand times no! Had
not the forces of a future order, had not the International of Labor--the Second
International--solemnly declared in 1907 in Stuttgart, in 1911 in Copenhagen
and in 1912 in Basel: "We will fight war by all means at our disposal. Let the
exploiters start a war. It will begin as a war of capitalist governments against
each other; it will end--it must end--as a war of the working class of the world
against world capitalism; it must end in the proletarian revolution." We, the
socialists of the world, comrades from England and Russia, from America and
Germany, from France and Austria; we comrades from all over the world, had
solemnly promised ourselves: "War against war!" We had promised ourselves
and our cause to answer the call of capitalism for a world war with a call on the
proletariat for a world revolution.
Days passed. July disappeared in the ocean of time. The first days of August
brought the booming of the cannon to our ears, messengers of the grim reality of
war. And then the news of the collapse of the Second International; reports of
betrayal by the socialists; betrayal in London and Vienna; betrayal in Berlin and
Brussels; betrayal in Paris; betrayal everywhere. What would Kautsky say to this
rank betrayal, Kautsky, the foremost disciple of Marx, Kautsky, the foremost
theoretician of the Second International? Will he at least speak up? He did not
speak up. Commenting on the betrayal he wrote in "Die Neue Zeit": "Die Kritik
der Waffen hat eingesetzt; jetzt hat die Waffe der Kritik zu schweigen."[1] With
this one sentence Kautsky replaced Marxism as the basis of his science with rank
and undisguised hypocrisy. From then on although trying to retain the toga of a
Marxist scholar on his shoulders, with thousands of "if's" and "when's" and
"but's" he became the apologist for the betrayal of the German
Social-Democracy, and the betrayal of the Second International.
[1] The arbitrament of arms is on; now the weapon of criticism must rest.
It is true that his "if's" and "when's" and "but's" did not satisfy the Executive
Committee of the Social-Democratic Party. They hoped for a victory of the
imperial army and wanted to secure a full and unmitigated share of the glory of
"His Majesty's" victory. That is why they did not appreciate Kautsky's excellent
service. So they helped the renegade to a cheap martyrdom by removing him
from the editorship of "Die Neue Zeit." After 1918 it may have dawned upon
Scheidemann and Ebert how much better Kautsky served the capitalist cause by
couching his betrayal in words that did not lose him outright all the confidence
of the proletariat. And Kautsky himself is now exhausting every effort to prove
to Noske and Scheidemann how cruelly he was mistreated and how well he
deserves to be taken back to their bosom.
Kautsky's book "Terrorism and Communism" is dictated by hatred of the

Russian revolution. It is influenced by fear of a like revolution in Germany. It is
written with tears for the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie and its
pseudo-"socialist" henchmen who have been sacrificed on the altar of revolution
by the proletarian dictatorship in Russia. Kautsky prefers to sacrifice the
revolution and the revolutionists on the altar of "humanitarianism." The author
of "Ethics and the Materialist Conception of History" knows--must know--that
humanitarianism under capitalism is capitalist humanitarianism. This
humanitarianism mints gold out of the bones, the blood, the health and the
suffering of the whole working class while it sheds tears about an individual case
of cruelty to one human being. This humanitarianism punishes murder with
death and beats to death the pacifist who protests against war as an act of mass
murder. Under the cloak of "humanitarian instincts" Kautsky only hides the
enemy of the proletarian revolution. The question at issue is not terrorism. It is
the dictatorship; it is revolution itself. If the Russian proletariat was justified in
taking over power it was in duty bound to use all means necessary to keep it. If it
is a crime for them to use terrorist means then it was a crime to take a power
which they could maintain only by terrorist means. And that is really Kautsky's
point. The crime of the Bolsheviki is that they took power. If Kautsky were a
mere sentimentalist and yet a revolutionist he could shed tears over the
unwillingness of the bourgeoisie to give up power without a struggle. But not
being a revolutionist he condemns the proletariat for having taken and
maintained power by the only means possible, by force. Kautsky would much
prefer to shed crocodile tears over tens of thousands of proletarian revolutionists
slaughtered by a successful counter-revolution. He scorns the Russian
Communists because they robbed him of the opportunity to parade his petit
bourgeois and consequently pro-capitalist "humanitarian" sentiments in a
pro-revolutionary cloak. But he must parade them at any cost. So he parades
them without disguise as a mourner for the suppressed bourgeoisie in Russia.
Trotsky's answer to Kautsky is not only one side of a controversy. It is one of the
literary fruits of the revolution itself. It breathes the breath of revolution. It
conquers the gray scholastic theory of the renegade with the irresistible weapon
of the revolutionary experience of the Russian proletariat. It refuses to shed tears
over the victims of Gallifet and shows what alone saved the Russian revolution
from the Russian Gallifets, the Kolchaks, Wrangels, etc.
Trotsky's book is not only an answer to Karl Kautsky; it is an answer to the

thousands of Kautskys in the socialist movement the world over who want the
proletariat to drown the memory of seas of proletarian blood shed by their
treachery in an ocean of tears shed for the suppressed bourgeoisie of Russia.
Trotsky's book is one of the most effective weapons in the literary arsenal of the
revolutionary proletariat in its fight against the social traitors for leadership of
the proletarian masses.
PREFACE
By H. N. BRAILSFORD
It has been said of the Bolsheviks that they are more interesting than
Bolshevism. To those who hold to the economic interpretation of history that
may seem a heresy. None the less, I believe that the personality not merely of the
leaders but also of their party goes far to explain the making and survival of the
Russian Revolution. To us in the West they seem a wholly foreign type. With
Socialist leaders and organizations we and our fathers have been familiar for
three-quarters of a century. There has been no lack of talent and even of genius
among them. The movement has produced its great theorist in Marx, its orator in
Jaurès, its powerful tacticians like Bebel, and it has influenced literature in
Morris, Anatole France and Shaw. It bred, however, no considerable man of
action, and it was left for the Russians to do what generations of Western
Socialists had spent their lives in discussing. There was in this Russian
achievement an almost barbaric simplicity and directness. Here were man who
really believed the formulæ of our theorists and the resolutions of our
Congresses. What had become for us a sterilized and almost respectable
orthodoxy rang to their ears as a trumpet call to action. The older generation has
found it difficult to pardon their sincerity. The rest of us want to understand the
miracle.
The real audacity of the Bolsheviks lay in this, that they made a proletarian
revolution precisely in that country which, of all portions of the civilized world,
seemed the least prepared for it by its economic development. For an agrarian
revolt, for the subdivision of the soil, even for the overthrow of the old
governing class, Russia was certainly ready. But any spontaneous revolution,
with its foundations laid in the masses of the peasantry, would have been
individualistic and not communistic. The daring of the Bolsheviks lay in their
belief that the minute minority of the urban working class could, by its
concentration, its greater intelligence and its relative capacity for organization,
dominate the inert peasant mass, and give to their outbreak of land-hunger the
character and form of a constructive proletarian revolution. The bitter struggle
among Russian parties which lasted from March, 1917, down to the defeat of
Wrangel in November, 1920, was really an internecine competition among them
for the leadership of the peasants. Which of these several groups could enlist
their confidence, to the extent of inducing them not merely to fight, but to accept
the discipline, military and civilian, necessary for victory? At the start the
Bolsheviks had everything against them. They are nearly all townsmen. They
talked in terms of a foreign and very German doctrine. Few of them, save Lenin,
grasped the problems of rural life at all. The landed class should at least have
known the peasant better. Their chief rivals were the Social Revolutionaries, a
party which from its first beginnings had made a cult of the Russian peasant,
studied him, idealized him and courted him, which even seemed in 1917 to have
won him. Many circumstances explain the success of the Bolsheviks, who
proved once again in history the capacity of the town, even when its population
is relatively minute, for swift and concentrated action. They also had the luck to
deal with opponents who committed the supreme mistake of invoking foreign
aid. But none of these advantages would have availed without an immense
superiority of character. The Slav temperament, dreamy, emotional,
undisciplined, showed itself at its worst in the incorrigible self-indulgence of the
more aristocratic "Whites," while the "intellectuals" of the moderate Socialist
and Liberal groups have been ruined for action by their exclusively literary and
æsthetic education. The Bolsheviks may be a less cultivated group, but, in their
underground life of conspiracy, they had learned sobriety, discipline, obedience,
and mutual confidence. Their rigid dogmatic Marxist faith gives to them the
power of action which belongs only to those who believe without criticism or
question. Their ability to lead depends much less than most Englishmen suppose,
on their ruthlessness and their readiness to practise the arts of intimidation and
suppression. Their chief asset is their self-confidence. In every emergency they
are always sure that they have the only workable plan. They stand before the rest
of Russia as one man. They never doubt or despair, and even when they
compromise, they do it with an air of truculence. Their survival amid invasion,
famine, blockade, and economic collapse has been from first to last a triumph of
the unflinching will and the fanatical faith. They have spurred a lazy and
demoralized people to notable feats of arms and to still more astonishing feats of
endurance. To hypnotize a nation in this fashion is, perhaps, the most remarkable
feat of the human will in modern times.
This book is, so far, by far the most typical expression of the Bolshevik
temperament which the revolution has produced. Characteristically it is a
polemic, and not a constructive essay. Its self-confidence, its dash, even its
insolence, are a true expression of the movement. Its author bears a
world-famous name. Everyone can visualize the powerful head, the singularly
handsome features, the athletic figure of the man. He makes in private talk an
impression of decision and definiteness. He is not rapid or expansive in speech,
for everything that he says is calculated and clear cut. One has the sense that one
is in the presence of abounding yet disciplined vitality. The background is an
office which by its military order and punctuality rebukes the habitual
slovenliness of Russia. On the platform his manner was much quieter than I
expected. He spoke rather slowly, in a pleasant tenor voice, walking to and fro
across the stage and choosing his words, obviously anxious to express his
thoughts forcibly but also exactly. A flash of wit and a striking phrase came
frequently, but the manner was emphatically not that of a demagogue. The man,
indeed, is a natural aristocrat, and his tendency, which Lenin, the aristocrat by
birth, corrects, is towards military discipline and authoritative regimentation.
There is nothing surprising to-day in the note of authority which one hears in
Trotsky's voice and detects in his writing, for he is the chief of a considerable
army, which owes everything to his talent for organization. It was at
Brest-Litovsk that he displayed the audacity which is genius. Up to that moment
there was little in his career to distinguish him from his comrades of the
revolutionary under-world--a university course cut short by prison, an
apprenticeship to agitation in Russia, some years of exile spent in Vienna, Paris,
and New York, the distinction which he shares with Tchitcherin of "sitting" in a
British prison, a ready wit, a gift of trenchant speech, but as yet neither the solid
achievement nor the legend which gives confidence. Yet this obscure agitator,
handicapped in such a task by his Jewish birth, faced the diplomatist and soldiers
of the Central Empires, flushed as they were with victory and the insolence of
their kind, forced them into public debate, staggered them by talking of first
principles as though the defeat and impotence of Russia counted for nothing, and
actually used the negotiations to shout across their heads his summons to their
own subjects to revolt. He showed in this astonishing performance the grace and
audacity of a "matador." This unique bit of drama revealed the persistent belief
of the Bolsheviks in the power of the defiant challenge, the magnetic effect of
sheer will. Since this episode his services to the revolution have been more solid
but not less brilliant. He had no military knowledge or experience, yet he took in
hand the almost desperate task of creating an army. He has often been compared
to Carnot. But, save that both had lost officers, there was little in common
between the French and the Russian armies in the early stages of the two
revolutions. The French army had not been demoralized by defeat, or wearied by
long inaction, or sapped by destructive propaganda. Trotsky had to create his
Red Army from the foundations. He imposed firm discipline, and yet contrived
to preserve the élan of the revolutionary spirit. Hampered by the inconceivable
difficulties that arose from ruined railways and decayed industries, he none the
less contrived to make a military machine which overthrew the armies of
Kolchak, Denikin and Wrangel, with the flower of the old professional officers
at their head. As a feat of organization under inordinate difficulties, his work
ranks as the most remarkable performance of the revolution.
It is not the business of a preface to anticipate the argument of a book, still less
to obtrude personal opinions. Kautsky's labored essay, to which this book is the
brilliant reply, has been translated into English, and is widely known. The case
against the possibility of political democracy in a capitalist society could hardly
be better put than in these pages, and the polemic against purely evolutionary
methods is formidable. The English reader of to-day is aware, however, that the
Russian revolution has not stood still since Trotsky wrote. We have to realize
that, even in the view of the Bolsheviks themselves, the evolution towards
Communism is in Russia only in its early stages. The recent compromises imply,
at the best, a very long period of transition, through controlled capitalist
production, to Socialism. Experience has proved that catastrophic revolution and
the seizure of political power do not in themselves avail to make a Socialist
society. The economic development in that direction has actually been retarded,
and Russia, under the stress of civil war, has retrograded into a primitive village
system of production and exchange. To every reader's mind the question will be
present whether the peculiar temperament of the Bolsheviks has led them to
over-estimate the importance of political power, to underestimate the inert
resistance of the majority, and to risk too much for the illusion of dictating. To
that question history has not yet given the decisive answer. The dæmonic will
that made the revolution and defended it by achieving the impossible, may yet
vindicate itself against the dull trend of impersonal forces.
Dictatorship vs. Democracy
Introduction
The origin of this book was the learned brochure by Kautsky with the same
name. My work was begun at the most intense period of the struggle with
Denikin and Yudenich, and more than once was interrupted by events at the
front. In the most difficult days, when the first chapters were being written, all
the attention of Soviet Russia was concentrated on purely military problems. We
were obliged to defend first of all the very possibility of Socialist economic
reconstruction. We could busy ourselves little with industry, further than was
necessary to maintain the front. We were obliged to expose Kautsky's economic
slanders mainly by analogy with his political slanders. The monstrous assertions
of Kautsky--to the effect that the Russian workers were incapable of labor
discipline and economic self-control--could, at the beginning of this work, nearly
a year ago, be combatted chiefly by pointing to the high state of discipline and
heroism in battle of the Russian workers at the front created by the civil war.
That experience was more than enough to explode these bourgeois slanders. But
now a few months have gone by, and we can turn to facts and conclusions drawn
directly from the economic life of Soviet Russia.
As soon as the military pressure relaxed after the defeat of Kolchak and
Yudenich and the infliction of decisive blows on Denikin, after the conclusion of
peace with Esthonia and the beginning of negotiations with Lithuania and
Poland, the whole country turned its mind to things economic. And this one fact,
of a swift and concentrated transference of attention and energy from one set of
problems to another--very different, but requiring not less sacrifice--is
incontrovertible evidence of the mighty vigor of the Soviet order. In spite of
political tortures, physical sufferings and horrors, the laboring masses are
infinitely distant from political decomposition, from moral collapse, or from
apathy. Thanks to a regime which, though it has inflicted great hardships upon
them, has given their life a purpose and a high goal, they preserve an
extraordinary moral stubbornness and ability unexampled in history, and
concentrate their attention and will on collective problems. To-day, in all
branches of industry, there is going on an energetic struggle for the
establishment of strict labor discipline, and for the increase of the productivity of
labor. The party organizations, the trade unions, the factory and workshop
administrative committees, rival one another in this respect, with the undivided
support of the public opinion of the working class as a whole. Factory after
factory willingly, by resolution at its general meeting, increases its working day.
Petrograd and Moscow set the example, and the provinces emulate Petrograd.
Communist Saturdays and Sundays--that is to say, voluntary and unpaid work in
hours appointed for rest--spread ever wider and wider, drawing into their reach
many, many hundreds of thousands of working men and women. The industry
and productivity of labor at the Communist Saturdays and Sundays, according to
the report of experts and the evidence of figures, is of a remarkably high
standard.
Voluntary mobilizations for labor problems in the party and in the Young
Communist League are carried out with just as much enthusiasm as hitherto for
military tasks. Voluntarism supplements and gives life to universal labor service.
The Committees for universal labor service recently set up have spread all over
the country. The attraction of the population to work on a mass scale (clearing
snow from the roads, repairing railway lines, cutting timber, chopping and
bringing up of wood to the towns, the simplest building operations, the cutting of
slate and of peat) become more and more widespread and organized every day.
The ever-increasing employment of military formations on the labor front would
be quite impossible in the absence of elevated enthusiasm for labor.
True, we live in the midst of a very difficult period of economic

depression--exhausted, poverty-stricken, and hungry. But this is no argument
against the Soviet regime. All periods of transition have been characterized by
just such tragic features. Every class society (serf, feudal, capitalist), having
exhausted its vitality, does not simply leave the arena, but is violently swept off
by an intense struggle, which immediately brings to its participants even greater
privations and sufferings than those against which they rose.
The transition from feudal economy to bourgeois society--a step of gigantic

importance from the point of view of progress--gave us a terrifying list of
martyrs. However the masses of serfs suffered under feudalism, however
difficult it has been, and is, for the proletariat to live under capitalism, never
have the sufferings of the workers reached such a pitch as at the epochs when the
old feudal order was being violently shattered, and was yielding place to the
new. The French Revolution of the eighteenth century, which attained its titanic
dimensions under the pressure of the masses exhausted with suffering, itself
deepened and rendered more acute their misfortunes for a prolonged period and
to an extraordinary extent. Can it be otherwise?
Palace revolutions, which end merely by personal reshufflings at the top, can
take place in a short space of time, having practically no effect on the economic
life of the country. Quite another matter are revolutions which drag into their
whirlpool millions of workers. Whatever be the form of society, it rests on the
foundation of labor. Dragging the mass of the people away from labor, drawing
them for a prolonged period into the struggle, thereby destroying their
connection with production, the revolution in all these ways strikes deadly blows
at economic life, and inevitably lowers the standard which it found at its birth.
The more perfect the revolution, the greater are the masses it draws in; and the
longer it is prolonged, the greater is the destruction it achieves in the apparatus
of production, and the more terrible inroads does it make upon public resources.
From this there follows merely the conclusion which did not require proof--that
a civil war is harmful to economic life. But to lay this at the door of the Soviet
economic system is like accusing a new-born human being of the birth-pangs of
the mother who brought him into the world. The problem is to make a civil war a
short one; and this is attained only by resoluteness in action. But it is just against
revolutionary resoluteness that Kautsky's whole book is directed.
*****
Since the time that the book under examination appeared, not only in Russia, but
throughout the world--and first of all in Europe--the greatest events have taken
place, or processes of great importance have developed, undermining the last
buttresses of Kautskianism.
In Germany, the civil war has been adopting an ever fiercer character. The
external strength in organization of the old party and trade union democracy of
the working class has not only not created conditions for a more peaceful and
"humane" transition to Socialism--as follows from the present theory of
Kautsky--but, on the contrary, has served as one of the principal reasons for the
long-drawn-out character of the struggle, and its constantly growing ferocity.
The more German Social-Democracy became a conservative, retarding force, the
more energy, lives, and blood have had to be spent by the German proletariat,
devoted to it, in a series of systematic attacks on the foundation of bourgeois
society, in order, in the process of the struggle itself, to create an actually

revolutionary organization, capable of guiding the proletariat to final victory.
The conspiracy of the German generals, their fleeting seizure of power, and the
bloody events which followed, have again shown what a worthless and wretched
masquerade is so-called democracy, during the collapse of imperialism and a
civil war. This democracy that has outlived itself has not decided one question,
has not reconciled one contradiction, has not healed one wound, has not warded
off risings either of the Right or of the Left; it is helpless, worthless, fraudulent,
and serves only to confuse the backward sections of the people, especially the
lower middle-classes.
The hope expressed by Kautsky, in the conclusion of his book, that the Western
countries, the "old democracies" of France and England--crowned as they are
with victory--will afford us a picture of a healthy, normal, peaceful, truly
Kautskian development of Socialism, is one of the most puerile illusions
possible. The so-called Republican democracy of victorious France, at the
present moment, is nothing but the most reactionary, grasping government that
has ever existed in the world. Its internal policy is built upon fear, greed, and
violence, in just as great a measure as its external policy. On the other hand, the
French proletariat, misled more than any other class has ever been misled, is
more and more entering on the path of direct action. The repressions which the
government of the Republic has hurled upon the General Confederation of Labor
show that even syndicalist Kautskianism--i.e., hypocritical compromise--has no
legal place within the framework of bourgeois democracy. The revolutionizing
of the masses, the growing ferocity of the propertied classes, and the
disintegration of intermediate groups--three parallel processes which determine
the character and herald the coming of a cruel civil war--have been going on
before our eyes in full blast during the last few months in France.
In Great Britain, events, different in form, are moving along the self-same
fundamental road. In that country, the ruling class of which is oppressing and
plundering the whole world more than ever before, the formulæ of democracy
have lost their meaning even as weapons of parliamentary swindling. The
specialist best qualified in this sphere, Lloyd George, appeals now not to
democracy, but to a union of Conservative and Liberal property holders against
the working class. In his arguments there remains not a trace of the vague
democracy of the "Marxist" Kautsky. Lloyd George stands on the ground of
class realities, and for this very reason speaks in the language of civil war. The
British working class, with that ponderous learning by experience which is its
distinguishing feature, is approaching that stage of its struggle before which the
most heroic pages of Chartism will fade, just as the Paris Commune will grow
pale before the coming victorious revolt of the French proletariat.
Precisely because historical events have, with stern energy, been developing in
these last months their revolutionary logic, the author of this present work asks
himself: Does it still require to be published? Is it still necessary to confute
Kautsky theoretically? Is there still theoretical necessity to justify revolutionary
terrorism?
Unfortunately, yes. Ideology, by its very essence, plays in the Socialist

movement an enormous part. Even for practical England the period has arrived
when the working class must exhibit an ever-increasing demand for a theoretical
statement of its experiences and its problems. On the other hand, even the
proletarian psychology includes in itself a terrible inertia of conservatism--the
more that, in the present case, there is a question of nothing less than the
traditional ideology of the parties of the Second International which first roused
the proletariat, and recently were so powerful. After the collapse of official
social-patriotism (Scheidemann, Victor Adler, Renaudel, Vandervelde,
Henderson, Plekhanov, etc.), international Kautskianism (the staff of the German
Independents, Friedrich Adler, Longuet, a considerable section of the Italians,
the British Independent Labor Party, the Martov group, etc.) has become the
chief political factor on which the unstable equilibrium of capitalist society
depends. It may be said that the will of the working masses of the whole of the
civilized world, directly influenced by the course of events, is at the present
moment incomparably more revolutionary than their consciousness, which is
still dominated by the prejudices of parliamentarism and compromise. The
struggle for the dictatorship of the working class means, at the present moment,
an embittered struggle with Kautskianism within the working class. The lies and
prejudices of the policy of compromise, still poisoning the atmosphere even in
parties tending towards the Third International, must be thrown aside. This book
must serve the ends of an irreconcilable struggle against the cowardice,
half-measures, and hypocrisy of Kautskianism in all countries.
*****
P.S.--To-day (May, 1920) the clouds have again gathered over Soviet Russia.
Bourgeois Poland, by its attack on the Ukraine, has opened the new offensive of
world imperialism against the Soviet Republic. The gigantic perils again
growing up before the revolution, and the great sacrifices again imposed on the
laboring masses by the war, are once again pushing Russian Kautskianism on to
the path of open opposition to the Soviet Government--i.e., in reality, on to the
path of assistance to the world murderers of Soviet Russia. It is the fate of
Kautskianism to try to help the proletarian revolution when it is in satisfactory
circumstances, and to raise all kinds of obstacles in its way when it is
particularly in need of help. Kautsky has more than once foretold our
destruction, which must serve as the best proof of his, Kautsky's, theoretical
rectitude. In his fall, this "successor of Marx" has reached a stage at which his
sole serious political programme consists in speculations on the collapse of the
proletarian dictatorship.
He will be once again mistaken. The destruction of bourgeois Poland by the Red
Army, guided by Communist working men, will appear as a new manifestation
of the power of the proletarian dictatorship, and will thereby inflict a crushing
blow on bourgeois scepticism (Kautskianism) in the working class movement. In
spite of mad confusion of external forms, watchwords, and appearances, history
has extremely simplified the fundamental meaning of its own process, reducing
it to a struggle of imperialism against Communism. Pilsudsky is fighting, not
only for the lands of the Polish magnates in the Ukraine and in White Russia, not
only for capitalist property and for the Catholic Church, but also for
parliamentary democracy and for evolutionary Socialism, for the Second
International, and for the right of Kautsky to remain a critical hanger-on of the
bourgeoisie. We are fighting for the Communist International, and for the
international proletarian revolution. The stakes are great on either side. The
struggle will be obstinate and painful. We hope for the victory, for we have
every historical right to it.
L. TROTSKY.
Moscow, May 29, 1920.
Dictatorship vs. Democracy
A Reply to Karl Kautsky

By LEON TROTSKY
THE BALANCE OF POWER
The argument which is repeated again and again in criticisms of the Soviet
system in Russia, and particularly in criticisms of revolutionary attempts to set
up a similar structure in other countries, is the argument based on the balance of
power. The Soviet regime in Russia is utopian--"because it does not correspond
to the balance of power." Backward Russia cannot put objects before itself
which would be appropriate to advanced Germany. And for the proletariat of
Germany it would be madness to take political power into its own hands, as this
"at the present moment" would disturb the balance of power. The League of
Nations is imperfect, but still corresponds to the balance of power. The struggle
for the overthrow of imperialist supremacy is utopian--the balance of power only
requires a revision of the Versailles Treaty. When Longuet hobbled after Wilson
this took place, not because of the political decomposition of Longuet, but in
honor of the law of the balance of power. The Austrian president, Seitz, and the
chancellor, Renner, must, in the opinion of Friedrich Adler, exercise their
bourgeois impotence at the central posts of the bourgeois republic, for otherwise
the balance of power would be infringed. Two years before the world war, Karl
Renner, then not a chancellor, but a "Marxist" advocate of opportunism,
explained to me that the regime of June 3--that is, the union of landlords and
capitalists crowned by the monarchy--must inevitably maintain itself in Russia
during a whole historical period, as it answered to the balance of power.
What is this balance of power after all--that sacramental formula which is to

define, direct, and explain the whole course of history, wholesale and retail?
Why exactly is it that the formula of the balance of power, in the mouth of
Kautsky and his present school, inevitably appears as a justification of
indecision, stagnation, cowardice and treachery?
By the balance of power they understand everything you please: the level of
production attained, the degree of differentiation of classes, the number of
organized workers, the total funds at the disposal of the trade unions, sometimes
the results of the last parliamentary elections, frequently the degree of readiness
for compromise on the part of the ministry, or the degree of effrontery of the
financial oligarchy. Most frequently, it means that summary political impression

which exists in the mind of a half-blind pedant, or a so-called realist politician,
who, though he has absorbed the phraseology of Marxism, in reality is guided by
the most shallow manoeuvres, bourgeois prejudices, and parliamentary "tactics."
After a whispered conversation with the director of the police department, an
Austrian Social-Democratic politician in the good, and not so far off, old times
always knew exactly whether the balance of power permitted a peaceful street
demonstration in Vienna on May Day. In the case of the Eberts, Scheidemanns
and Davids, the balance of power was, not so very long ago, calculated exactly
by the number of fingers which were extended to them at their meeting in the
Reichstag with Bethmann-Hollweg, or with Ludendorff himself.
According to Friedrich Adler, the establishment of a Soviet dictatorship in

Austria would be a fatal infraction of the balance of power; the Entente would
condemn Austria to starvation. In proof of this, Friedrich Adler, at the July
congress of Soviets, pointed to Hungary, where at that time the Hungarian
Renners had not yet, with the help of the Hungarian Adlers, overthrown the
dictatorship of the Soviets. At the first glance, it might really seem that Friedrich
Adler was right in the case of Hungary. The proletarian dictatorship was
overthrown there soon afterwards, and its place was filled by the ministry of the
reactionary Friedrich. But it is quite justifiable to ask: Did the latter correspond
to the balance of power? At all events, Friedrich and his Huszar might not even
temporarily have seized power had it not been for the Roumanian army. Hence,
it is clear that, when discussing the fate of the Soviet Government in Hungary, it
is necessary to take account of the "balance of power," at all events in two
countries--in Hungary itself, and in its neighbor, Roumania. But it is not difficult
to grasp that we cannot stop at this. If the dictatorship of the Soviets had been set
up in Austria before the maturing of the Hungarian crisis, the overthrow of the
Soviet regime in Budapest would have been an infinitely more difficult task.
Consequently, we have to include Austria also, together with the treacherous
policy of Friedrich Adler, in that balance of power which determined the
temporary fall of the Soviet Government in Hungary.
Friedrich Adler himself, however, seeks the key to the balance of power, not in
Russia and Hungary, but in the West, in the countries of Clemenceau and Lloyd
George. They have in their hands bread and coal--and really bread and coal,
especially in our time, are just as foremost factors in the mechanism of the
balance of power as cannon in the constitution of Lassalle. Brought down from
the heights, Adler's idea consists, consequently, in this: that the Austrian
proletariat must not seize power until such time, as it is permitted to do so by
Clemenceau (or Millerand--i.e., a Clemenceau of the second order).
However, even here it is permissible to ask: Does the policy of Clemenceau

himself really correspond to the balance of power? At the first glance it may
appear that it corresponds well enough, and, if it cannot be proved, it is, at least,
guaranteed by Clemenceau's gendarmes, who break up working-class meetings,
and arrest and shoot Communists. But here we cannot but remember that the
terrorist measures of the Soviet Government--that is, the same searches, arrests,
and executions, only directed against the counter-revolutionaries--are considered
by some people as a proof that the Soviet Government does not correspond to
the balance of power. In vain would we, however, begin to seek in our time,
anywhere in the world, a regime which, to preserve itself, did not have recourse
to measures of stern mass repression. This means that hostile class forces, having
broken through the framework of every kind of law--including that of
"democracy"--are striving to find their new balance by means of a merciless
struggle.
When the Soviet system was being instituted in Russia, not only the capitalist
politicians, but also the Socialist opportunists of all countries proclaimed it an
insolent challenge to the balance of forces. On this score, there was no quarrel
between Kautsky, the Austrian Count Czernin, and the Bulgarian Premier,
Radoslavov. Since that time, the Austro-Hungarian and German monarchies
have collapsed, and the most powerful militarism in the world has fallen into
dust. The Soviet regime has held out. The victorious countries of the Entente
have mobilized and hurled against it all they could. The Soviet Government has
stood firm. Had Kautsky, Friedrich Adler, and Otto Bauer been told that the
system of the dictatorship of the proletariat would hold out in Russia--first
against the attack of German militarism, and then in a ceaseless war with the
militarism of the Entente countries--the sages of the Second International would
have considered such a prophecy a laughable misunderstanding of the "balance
of power."
The balance of political power at any given moment is determined under the
influence of fundamental and secondary factors of differing degrees of
effectiveness, and only in its most fundamental quality is it determined by the
stage of the development of production. The social structure of a people is
extraordinarily behind the development of its productive forces. The lower

middle-classes, and particularly the peasantry, retain their existence long after
their economic methods have been made obsolete, and have been condemned, by
the technical development of the productive powers of society. The
consciousness of the masses, in its turn, is extraordinarily behind the
development of their social relations, the consciousness of the old Socialist
parties is a whole epoch behind the state of mind of the masses, and the
consciousness of the old parliamentary and trade union leaders, more reactionary
than the consciousness of their party, represents a petrified mass which history
has been unable hitherto either to digest or reject. In the parliamentary epoch,
during the period of stability of social relations, the psychological
factor--without great error--was the foundation upon which all current
calculations were based. It was considered that parliamentary elections reflected
the balance of power with sufficient exactness. The imperialist war, which upset
all bourgeois society, displayed the complete uselessness of the old criteria. The
latter completely ignored those profound historical factors which had gradually
been accumulating in the preceding period, and have now, all at once, appeared
on the surface, and have begun to determine the course of history.
The political worshippers of routine, incapable of surveying the historical

process in its complexity, in its internal clashes and contradictions, imagined to
themselves that history was preparing the way for the Socialist order
simultaneously and systematically on all sides, so that concentration of
production and the development of a Communist morality in the producer and
the consumer mature simultaneously with the electric plough and a
parliamentary majority. Hence the purely mechanical attitude towards
parliamentarism, which, in the eyes of the majority of the statesmen of the
Second International, indicated the degree to which society was prepared for
Socialism as accurately as the manometer indicates the pressure of steam. Yet
there is nothing more senseless than this mechanized representation of the
development of social relations.
If, beginning with the productive bases of society, we ascend the stages of the
superstructure--classes, the State, laws, parties, and so on--it may be established
that the weight of each additional part of the superstructure is not simply to be
added to, but in many cases to be multiplied by, the weight of all the preceding
stages. As a result, the political consciousness of groups which long imagined
themselves to be among the most advanced, displays itself, at a moment of
change, as a colossal obstacle in the path of historical development. To-day it is

quite beyond doubt that the parties of the Second International, standing at the
head of the proletariat, which dared not, could not, and would not take power
into their hands at the most critical moment of human history, and which led the
proletariat along the road of mutual destruction in the interests of imperialism,
proved a decisive factor of the counter-revolution.
The great forces of production--that shock factor in historical

development--were choked in those obsolete institutions of the superstructure
(private property and the national State) in which they found themselves locked
by all preceding development. Engendered by capitalism, the forces of
production were knocking at all the walls of the bourgeois national State,
demanding their emancipation by means of the Socialist organization of
economic life on a world scale. The stagnation of social groupings, the
stagnation of political forces, which proved themselves incapable of destroying
the old class groupings, the stagnation, stupidity and treachery of the directing
Socialist parties, which had assumed to themselves in reality the defense of
bourgeois society--all these factors led to an elemental revolt of the forces of
production, in the shape of the imperialist war. Human technical skill, the most
revolutionary factor in history, arose with the might accumulated during scores
of years against the disgusting conservatism and criminal stupidity of the
Scheidemanns, Kautskies, Renaudels, Vanderveldes and Longuets, and, by
means of its howitzers, machine-guns, dreadnoughts and aeroplanes, it began a
furious pogrom of human culture.
In this way the cause of the misfortunes at present experienced by humanity is

precisely that the development of the technical command of men over nature has
long ago grown ripe for the socialization of economic life. The proletariat has
occupied a place in production which completely guarantees its dictatorship,
while the most intelligent forces in history--the parties and their leaders--have
been discovered to be still wholly under the yoke of the old prejudices, and only
fostered a lack of faith among the masses in their own power. In quite recent
years Kautsky used to understand this. "The proletariat at the present time has
grown so strong," wrote Kautsky in his pamphlet, The Path to Power, "that it
can calmly await the coming war. There can be no more talk of a premature
revolution, now that the proletariat has drawn from the present structure of the
State such strength as could be drawn therefrom, and now that its reconstruction
has become a condition of the proletariat's further progress." From the moment
that the development of productive forces, outgrowing the framework of the

bourgeois national State, drew mankind into an epoch of crises and convulsions,
the consciousness of the masses was shaken by dread shocks out of the
comparative equilibrium of the preceding epoch. The routine and stagnation of
its mode of living, the hypnotic suggestion of peaceful legality, had already
ceased to dominate the proletariat. But it had not yet stepped, consciously and
courageously, on to the path of open revolutionary struggle. It wavered, passing
through the last moment of unstable equilibrium. At such a moment of
psychological change, the part played by the summit--the State, on the one hand,
and the revolutionary Party on the other--acquires a colossal importance. A
determined push from left or right is sufficient to move the proletariat, for a
certain period, to one or the other side. We saw this in 1914, when, under the
united pressure of imperialist governments and Socialist patriotic parties, the
working class was all at once thrown out of its equilibrium and hurled on to the
path of imperialism. We have since seen how the experience of the war, the
contrasts between its results and its first objects, is shaking the masses in a
revolutionary sense, making them more and more capable of an open revolt
against capitalism. In such conditions, the presence of a revolutionary party,
which renders to itself a clear account of the motive forces of the present epoch,
and understands the exceptional role amongst them of a revolutionary class;
which knows its inexhaustible, but unrevealed, powers; which believes in that
class and believes in itself; which knows the power of revolutionary method in
an epoch of instability of all social relations; which is ready to employ that
method and carry it through to the end--the presence of such a party represents a
factor of incalculable historical importance.
And, on the other hand, the Socialist party, enjoying traditional influence, which
does not render itself an account of what is going on around it, which does not
understand the revolutionary situation, and, therefore, finds no key to it, which
does not believe in either the proletariat or itself--such a party in our time is the
most mischievous stumbling block in history, and a source of confusion and
inevitable chaos.
Such is now the role of Kautsky and his sympathizers. They teach the proletariat
not to believe in itself, but to believe its reflection in the crooked mirror of
democracy which has been shattered by the jack-boot of militarism into a
thousand fragments. The decisive factor in the revolutionary policy of the
working class must be, in their view, not the international situation, not the
actual collapse of capitalism, not that social collapse which is generated thereby,
not that concrete necessity of the supremacy of the working class for which the
cry arises from the smoking ruins of capitalist civilization--not all this must
determine the policy of the revolutionary party of the proletariat--but that
counting of votes which is carried out by the capitalist tellers of parliamentarism.
Only a few years ago, we repeat, Kautsky seemed to understand the real inner
meaning of the problem of revolution. "Yes, the proletariat represents the sole
revolutionary class of the nation," wrote Kautsky in his pamphlet, The Path to
Power. It follows that every collapse of the capitalist order, whether it be of a
moral, financial, or military character, implies the bankruptcy of all the
bourgeois parties responsible for it, and signifies that the sole way out of the
blind alley is the establishment of the power of the proletariat. And to-day the
party of prostration and cowardice, the party of Kautsky, says to the working
class: "The question is not whether you to-day are the sole creative force in
history; whether you are capable of throwing aside that ruling band of robbers
into which the propertied classes have developed; the question is not whether
anyone else can accomplish this task on your behalf; the question is not whether
history allows you any postponement (for the present condition of bloody chaos
threatens to bury you yourself, in the near future, under the last ruins of
capitalism). The problem is for the ruling imperialist bandits to
succeed--yesterday or to-day--to deceive, violate, and swindle public opinion, by
collecting 51 per cent. of the votes against your 49. Perish the world, but long
live the parliamentary majority!"
THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT
"Marx and Engels hammered out the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat,
which Engels stubbornly defended in 1891, shortly before his death--the idea
that the political autocracy of the proletariat is the sole form in which it can
realize its control of the state."
That is what Kautsky wrote about ten years ago. The sole form of power for the
proletariat he considered to be not a Socialist majority in a democratic
parliament, but the political autocracy of the proletariat, its dictatorship. And it is
quite clear that, if our problem is the abolition of private property in the means
of production, the only road to its solution lies through the concentration of State
power in its entirety in the hands of the proletariat, and the setting up for the
transitional period of an exceptional regime--a regime in which the ruling class
is guided, not by general principles calculated for a prolonged period, but by
considerations of revolutionary policy.
The dictatorship is necessary because it is a case, not of partial changes, but of

the very existence of the bourgeoisie. No agreement is possible on this ground.
Only force can be the deciding factor. The dictatorship of the proletariat does not
exclude, of course, either separate agreements, or considerable concessions,
especially in connection with the lower middle-class and the peasantry. But the
proletariat can only conclude these agreements after having gained possession of
the apparatus of power, and having guaranteed to itself the possibility of
independently deciding on which points to yield and on which to stand firm, in
the interests of the general Socialist task.
Kautsky now repudiates the dictatorship of the proletariat at the very outset, as
the "tyranny of the minority over the majority." That is, he discerns in the
revolutionary regime of the proletariat those very features by which the honest
Socialists of all countries invariably describe the dictatorship of the exploiters,
albeit masked by the forms of democracy.
Abandoning the idea of a revolutionary dictatorship, Kautsky transforms the

question of the conquest of power by the proletariat into a question of the
conquest of a majority of votes by the Social-Democratic Party in one of the
electoral campaigns of the future. Universal suffrage, according to the legal
fiction of parliamentarism, expresses the will of the citizens of all classes in the
nation, and, consequently, gives a possibility of attracting a majority to the side
of Socialism. While the theoretical possibility has not been realized, the Socialist
minority must submit to the bourgeois majority. This fetishism of the
parliamentary majority represents a brutal repudiation, not only of the
dictatorship of the proletariat, but of Marxism and of the revolution altogether.
If, in principle, we are to subordinate Socialist policy to the parliamentary
mystery of majority and minority, it follows that, in countries where formal
democracy prevails, there is no place at all for the revolutionary struggle. If the
majority elected on the basis of universal suffrage in Switzerland pass draconian
legislation against strikers, or if the executive elected by the will of a formal
majority in Northern America shoots workers, have the Swiss and American
workers the "right" of protest by organizing a general strike? Obviously, no. The
political strike is a form of extra-parliamentary pressure on the "national will,"

as it has expressed itself through universal suffrage. True, Kautsky himself,
apparently, is ashamed to go as far as the logic of his new position demands.
Bound by some sort of remnant of the past, he is obliged to acknowledge the
possibility of correcting universal suffrage by action. Parliamentary elections, at
all events in principle, never took the place, in the eyes of the Social-Democrats,
of the real class struggle, of its conflicts, repulses, attacks, revolts; they were
considered merely as a contributory fact in this struggle, playing a greater part at
one period, a smaller at another, and no part at all in the period of dictatorship.
In 1891, that is, not long before his death, Engels, as we just heard, obstinately
defended the dictatorship of the proletariat as the only possible form of its
control of the State. Kautsky himself more than once repeated this definition.
Hence, by the way, we can see what an unworthy forgery is Kautsky's present
attempt to throw back the dictatorship of the proletariat at us as a purely Russian
invention.
Who aims at the end cannot reject the means. The struggle must be carried on
with such intensity as actually to guarantee the supremacy of the proletariat. If
the Socialist revolution requires a dictatorship--"the sole form in which the
proletariat can achieve control of the State"--it follows that the dictatorship must
be guaranteed at all cost.
To write a pamphlet about dictatorship one needs an ink-pot and a pile of paper,
and possibly, in addition, a certain number of ideas in one's head. But in order to
establish and consolidate the dictatorship, one has to prevent the bourgeoisie
from undermining the State power of the proletariat. Kautsky apparently thinks
that this can be achieved by tearful pamphlets. But his own experience ought to
have shown him that it is not sufficient to have lost all influence with the
proletariat, to acquire influence with the bourgeoisie.
It is only possible to safeguard the supremacy of the working class by forcing the
bourgeoisie accustomed to rule, to realize that it is too dangerous an undertaking
for it to revolt against the dictatorship of the proletariat, to undermine it by
conspiracies, sabotage, insurrections, or the calling in of foreign troops. The
bourgeoisie, hurled from power, must be forced to obey. In what way? The
priests used to terrify the people with future penalties. We have no such
resources at our disposal. But even the priests' hell never stood alone, but was
always bracketed with the material fire of the Holy Inquisition, and with the
scorpions of the democratic State. Is it possible that Kautsky is leaning to the
idea that the bourgeoisie can be held down with the help of the categorical
imperative, which in his last writings plays the part of the Holy Ghost? We, on
our part, can only promise him our material assistance if he decides to equip a
Kantian-humanitarian mission to the realms of Denikin and Kolchak. At all
events, there he would have the possibility of convincing himself that the
counter-revolutionaries are not naturally devoid of character, and that, thanks to
their six years' existence in the fire and smoke of war, their character has
managed to become thoroughly hardened. Every White Guard has long ago
acquired the simple truth that it is easier to hang a Communist to the branch of a
tree than to convert him with a book of Kautsky's. These gentlemen have no
superstitious fear, either of the principles of democracy or of the flames of
hell--the more so because the priests of the church and of official learning act in
collusion with them, and pour their combined thunders exclusively on the heads
of the Bolsheviks. The Russian White Guards resemble the German and all other
White Guards in this respect--that they cannot be convinced or shamed, but only
terrorized or crushed.
The man who repudiates terrorism in principle--i.e., repudiates measures of

suppression and intimidation towards determined and armed counter-revolution,
must reject all idea of the political supremacy of the working class and its
revolutionary dictatorship. The man who repudiates the dictatorship of the
proletariat repudiates the Socialist revolution, and digs the grave of Socialism.
*****
At the present time, Kautsky has no theory of the social revolution. Every time
he tries to generalize his slanders against the revolution and the dictatorship of
the proletariat, he produces merely a réchauffé of the prejudices of Jaurèsism
and Bernsteinism.
"The revolution of 1789," writes Kautsky, "itself put an end to the most
important causes which gave it its harsh and violent character, and prepared the
way for milder forms of the future revolution." (Page 140.)[2] Let us admit this,
though to do so we have to forget the June days of 1848 and the horrors of the
suppression of the Commune. Let us admit that the great revolution of the
eighteenth century, which by measures of merciless terror destroyed the rule of
absolutism, of feudalism, and of clericalism, really prepared the way for more
peaceful and milder solutions of social problems. But, even if we admit this
purely liberal standpoint, even here our accuser will prove to be completely in
the wrong; for the Russian Revolution, which culminated in the dictatorship of
the proletariat, began with just that work which was done in France at the end of
the eighteenth century. Our forefathers, in centuries gone by, did not take the
trouble to prepare the democratic way--by means of revolutionary terrorism--for
milder manners in our revolution. The ethical mandarin, Kautsky, ought to take
these circumstances into account, and accuse our forefathers, not us.
[2] Translator's Note--For convenience sake, the references throughout have

been altered to fall in the English translation of Kautsky's book. Mr. Kerridge's
translation, however, has not been adhered to.
Kautsky, however, seems to make a little concession in this direction. "True," he

says, "no man of insight could doubt that a military monarchy like the German,
the Austrian, or the Russian could be overthrown only by violent methods. But
in this connection there was always less thought" (amongst whom?), "of the
bloody use of arms, and more of the working class weapon peculiar to the
proletariat--the mass strike. And that a considerable portion of the proletariat,
after seizing power, would again--as at the end of the eighteenth century--give
vent to its rage and revenge in bloodshed could not be expected. This would
have meant a complete negation of all progress." (Page 147.)
As we see, the war and a series of revolutions were required to enable us to get a
proper view of what was going on in reality in the heads of some of our most
learned theoreticians. It turns out that Kautsky did not think that a Romanoff or a
Hohenzollern could be put away by means of conversations; but at the same time
he seriously imagined that a military monarchy could be overthrown by a
general strike--i.e., by a peaceful demonstration of folded arms. In spite of the
Russian revolution, and the world discussion of this question, Kautsky, it turns
out, retains the anarcho-reformist view of the general strike. We might point out
to him that, in the pages of its own journal, the Neue Zeit, it was explained
twelve years ago that the general strike is only a mobilization of the proletariat
and its setting up against its enemy, the State; but that the strike in itself cannot
produce the solution of the problem, because it exhausts the forces of the
proletariat sooner than those of its enemies, and this, sooner or later, forces the
workers to return to the factories. The general strike acquires a decisive
importance only as a preliminary to a conflict between the proletariat and the

armed forces of the opposition--i.e., to the open revolutionary rising of the
workers. Only by breaking the will of the armies thrown against it can the
revolutionary class solve the problem of power--the root problem of every
revolution. The general strike produces the mobilization of both sides, and gives
the first serious estimate of the powers of resistance of the counter-revolution.
But only in the further stages of the struggle, after the transition to the path of
armed insurrection, can that bloody price be fixed which the revolutionary class
has to pay for power. But that it will have to pay with blood, that, in the struggle
for the conquest of power and for its consolidation, the proletariat will have not
only to be killed, but also to kill--of this no serious revolutionary ever had any
doubt. To announce that the existence of a determined life-and-death struggle
between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie "is a complete negation of all
progress," means simply that the heads of some of our most reverend
theoreticians take the form of a camera-obscura, in which objects are represented
upside down.
But, even when applied to more advanced and cultured countries with
established democratic traditions, there is absolutely no proof of the justice of
Kautsky's historical argument. As a matter of fact, the argument itself is not new.
Once upon a time the Revisionists gave it a character more based on principle.
They strove to prove that the growth of proletarian organizations under
democratic conditions guaranteed the gradual and imperceptible--reformist and
evolutionary--transition to Socialist society--without general strikes and risings,
without the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Kautsky, at that culminating period of his activity, showed that, in spite of the
forms of democracy, the class contradictions of capitalist society grew deeper,
and that this process must inevitably lead to a revolution and the conquest of
power by the proletariat.
No one, of course, attempted to reckon up beforehand the number of victims that

will be called for by the revolutionary insurrection of the proletariat, and by the
regime of its dictatorship. But it was clear to all that the number of victims will
vary with the strength of resistance of the propertied classes. If Kautsky desires
to say in his book that a democratic upbringing has not weakened the class
egoism of the bourgeoisie, this can be admitted without further parley.
If he wishes to add that the imperialist war, which broke out and continued for
four years, in spite of democracy, brought about a degradation of morals and
accustomed men to violent methods and action, and completely stripped the
bourgeoisie of the last vestige of awkwardness in ordering the destruction of
masses of humanity--here also he will be right.
All this is true on the face of it. But one has to struggle in real conditions. The
contending forces are not proletarian and bourgeois manikins produced in the
retort of Wagner-Kautsky, but a real proletariat against a real bourgeoisie, as
they have emerged from the last imperialist slaughter.
In this fact of merciless civil war that is spreading over the whole world,
Kautsky sees only the result of a fatal lapse from the "experienced tactics" of the
Second International.
"In reality, since the time," he writes, "that Marxism has dominated the Socialist
movement, the latter, up to the world war, was, in spite of its great activities,
preserved from great defeats. And the idea of insuring victory by means of
terrorist domination had completely disappeared from its ranks.
"Much was contributed in this connection by the fact that, at the time when
Marxism was the dominating Socialist teaching, democracy threw out firm roots
in Western Europe, and began there to change from an end of the struggle to a
trustworthy basis of political life." (Page 145.)
In this "formula of progress" there is not one atom of Marxism. The real process
of the struggle of classes and their material conflicts has been lost in Marxist
propaganda, which, thanks to the conditions of democracy, guarantees, forsooth,
a painless transition to a new and "wiser" order. This is the most vulgar
liberalism, a belated piece of rationalism in the spirit of the eighteenth
century--with the difference that the ideas of Condorcet are replaced by a
vulgarisation of the Communist Manifesto. All history resolves itself into an
endless sheet of printed paper, and the centre of this "humane" process proves to
be the well-worn writing table of Kautsky.
We are given as an example the working-class movement in the period of the

Second International, which, going forward under the banner of Marxism, never
sustained great defeats whenever it deliberately challenged them. But did not the
whole working-class movement, the proletariat of the whole world, and with it
the whole of human culture, sustain an incalculable defeat in August, 1914,
when history cast up the accounts of all the forces and possibilities of the
Socialist parties, amongst whom, we are told, the guiding role belonged to
Marxism, "on the firm footing of democracy"? Those parties proved bankrupt.
Those features of their previous work which Kautsky now wishes to render
permanent--self-adaptation, repudiation of "illegal" activity, repudiation of the
open fight, hopes placed in democracy as the road to a painless revolution--all
these fell into dust. In their fear of defeat, holding back the masses from open
conflict, dissolving the general strike discussions, the parties of the Second
International were preparing their own terrifying defeat; for they were not able to
move one finger to avert the greatest catastrophe in world history, the four years'
imperialist slaughter, which foreshadowed the violent character of the civil war.
Truly, one has to put a wadded night-cap not only over one's eyes, but over one's
nose and ears, to be able to-day, after the inglorious collapse of the Second
International, after the disgraceful bankruptcy of its leading party--the German
Social-Democracy--after the bloody lunacy of the world slaughter and the
gigantic sweep of the civil war, to set up in contrast to us, the profundity, the
loyalty, the peacefulness and the sobriety of the Second International, the
heritage of which we are still liquidating.
DEMOCRACY
"EITHER DEMOCRACY, OR CIVIL WAR"
Kautsky has a clear and solitary path to salvation: democracy. All that is
necessary is that every one should acknowledge it and bind himself to support it.
The Right Socialists must renounce the sanguinary slaughter with which they
have been carrying out the will of the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie itself must
abandon the idea of using its Noskes and Lieutenant Vogels to defend its
privileges to the last breath. Finally, the proletariat must once and for all reject
the idea of overthrowing the bourgeoisie by means other than those laid down in
the Constitution. If the conditions enumerated are observed, the social revolution
will painlessly melt into democracy. In order to succeed it is sufficient, as we
see, for our stormy history to draw a nightcap over its head, and take a pinch of
wisdom out of Kautsky's snuffbox.
"There exist only two possibilities," says our sage, "either democracy, or civil
war." (Page 220.) Yet, in Germany, where the formal elements of "democracy"
are present before our eyes, the civil war does not cease for a moment.
"Unquestionably," agrees Kautsky, "under the present National Assembly
Germany cannot arrive at a healthy condition. But that process of recovery will
not be assisted, but hindered, if we transform the struggle against the present
Assembly into a struggle against the democratic franchise." (Page 230.) As if the
question in Germany really did reduce itself to one of electoral forms and not to
one of the real possession of power!
The present National Assembly, as Kautsky admits, cannot "bring the country to
a healthy condition." Therefore let us begin the game again at the beginning. But
will the partners agree? It is doubtful. If the rubber is not favorable to us,
obviously it is so to them. The National Assembly which "is incapable of
bringing the country to a healthy condition," is quite capable, through the
mediocre dictatorship of Noske, of preparing the way for the dictatorship of
Ludendorff. So it was with the Constituent Assembly which prepared the way
for Kolchak. The historical mission of Kautsky consists precisely in having
waited for the revolution to write his (n + 1th) book, which should explain the
collapse of the revolution by all the previous course of history, from the ape to
Noske, and from Noske to Ludendorff. The problem before the revolutionary
party is a difficult one: its problem is to foresee the peril in good time, and to
forestall it by action. And for this there is no other way at present than to tear the
power out of the hands of its real possessors, the agrarian and capitalist
magnates, who are only temporarily hiding behind Messrs. Ebert and Noske.
Thus, from the present National Assembly, the path divides into two: either the
dictatorship of the imperialist clique, or the dictatorship of the proletariat. On
neither side does the path lead to "democracy." Kautsky does not see this. He
explains at great length that democracy is of great importance for its political
development and its education in organization of the masses, and that through it
the proletariat can come to complete emancipation. One might imagine that,
since the day on which the Erfurt Programme was written, nothing worthy of
notice had ever happened in the world!
Yet meanwhile, for decades, the proletariat of France, Germany, and the other
most important countries has been struggling and developing, making the widest
possible use of the institutions of democracy, and building up on that basis
powerful political organizations. This path of the education of the proletariat
through democracy to Socialism proved, however, to be interrupted by an event

of no inconsiderable importance--the world imperialist war. The class state at the
moment when, thanks to its machinations, the war broke out succeeded in
enlisting the assistance of the guiding organizations of Social-Democracy to
deceive the proletariat and draw it into the whirlpool. So that, taken as they
stand, the methods of democracy, in spite of the incontestable benefits which
they afford at a certain period, displayed an extremely limited power of action;
with the result that two generations of the proletariat, educated under conditions
of democracy, by no means guaranteed the necessary political preparation for
judging accurately an event like the world imperialist war. That experience gives
us no reasons for affirming that, if the war had broken out ten or fifteen years
later, the proletariat would have been more prepared for it. The bourgeois
democratic state not only creates more favorable conditions for the political
education of the workers, as compared with absolutism, but also sets a limit to
that development in the shape of bourgeois legality, which skilfully accumulates
and builds on the upper strata of the proletariat opportunist habits and
law-abiding prejudices. The school of democracy proved quite insufficient to
rouse the German proletariat to revolution when the catastrophe of the war was
at hand. The barbarous school of the war, social-imperialist ambitions, colossal
military victories, and unparalleled defeats were required. After these events,
which made a certain amount of difference in the universe, and even in the
Erfurt Programme, to come out with common-places as to meaning of
democratic parliamentarism for the education of the proletariat signifies a fall
into political childhood. This is just the misfortune which has overtaken
Kautsky.
"Profound disbelief in the political struggle of the proletariat," he writes, "and in

its participation in politics, was the characteristic of Proudhonism. To-day there
arises a similar (!!) view, and it is recommended to us as the new gospel of
Socialist thought, as the result of an experience which Marx did not, and could
not, know. In reality, it is only a variation of an idea which half a century ago
Marx was fighting, and which he in the end defeated." (Page 79.)
Bolshevism proves to be warmed-up Proudhonism! From a purely theoretical

point of view, this is one of the most brazen remarks in the pamphlet.
The Proudhonists repudiated democracy for the same reason that they repudiated
the political struggle generally. They stood for the economic organization of the
workers without the interference of the State, without revolutionary

outbreaks--for self-help of the workers on the basis of production for profit. As
far as they were driven by the course of events on to the path of the political
struggle, they, as lower middle-class theoreticians, preferred democracy, not
only to plutocracy, but to revolutionary dictatorship. What thoughts have they in
common with us? While we repudiate democracy in the name of the
concentrated power of the proletariat, the Proudhonists, on the other hand, were
prepared to make their peace with democracy, diluted by a federal basis, in order
to avoid the revolutionary monopoly of power by the proletariat. With more
foundation Kautsky might have compared us with the opponents of the
Proudhonists, the Blanquists, who understood the meaning of a revolutionary
government, but did not superstitiously make the question of seizing it depend
on the formal signs of democracy. But in order to put the comparison of the
Communists with the Blanquists on a reasonable footing, it would have to be
added that, in the Workers' and Soldiers' Councils, we had at our disposal such
an organization for revolution as the Blanquists could not even dream of; in our
party we had, and have, an invaluable organization of political leadership with a
perfected programme of the social revolution. Finally, we had, and have, a
powerful apparatus of economic transformation in our trade unions, which stand
as a whole under the banner of Communism, and support the Soviet
Government. Under such conditions, to talk of the renaissance of Proudhonist
prejudices in the shape of Bolshevism can only take place when one has lost all
traces of theoretical honesty and historical understanding.
THE IMPERIALIST TRANSFORMATION OF DEMOCRACY
It is not for nothing that the word "democracy" has a double meaning in the
political vocabulary. On the one hand, it means a state system founded on
universal suffrage and the other attributes of formal "popular government." On
the other hand, by the word "democracy" is understood the mass of the people
itself, in so far as it leads a political existence. In the second sense, as in the first,
the meaning of democracy rises above class distinctions. This peculiarity of
terminology has its profound political significance. Democracy as a political
system is the more perfect and unshakable the greater is the part played in the
life of the country by the intermediate and less differentiated mass of the
population--the lower middle-class of the town and the country. Democracy
achieved its highest expression in the nineteenth century in Switzerland and the
United States of North America. On the other side of the ocean the democratic
organization of power in a federal republic was based on the agrarian democracy

of the farmers. In the small Helvetian Republic, the lower middle-classes of the
towns and the rich peasantry constituted the basis of the conservative democracy
of the united cantons.
Born of the struggle of the Third Estate against the powers of feudalism, the
democratic State very soon becomes the weapon of defence against the class
antagonisms generated within bourgeois society. Bourgeois society succeeds in
this the more, the wider beneath it is the layer of the lower middle-class, the
greater is the importance of the latter in the economic life of the country, and the
less advanced, consequently, is the development of class antagonism. However,
the intermediate classes become ever more and more helplessly behind historical
development, and, thereby, become ever more and more incapable of speaking in
the name of the nation. True, the lower middle-class doctrinaires (Bernstein and
Company) used to demonstrate with satisfaction that the disappearance of the
middle-classes was not taking place with that swiftness that was expected by the
Marxian school. And, in reality, one might agree that, numerically, the
middle-class elements in the town, and especially in the country, still maintain
an extremely prominent position. But the chief meaning of evolution has shown
itself in the decline in importance on the part of the middle-classes from the
point of view of production: the amount of values which this class brings to the
general income of the nation has fallen incomparably more rapidly than the
numerical strength of the middle-classes. Correspondingly, falls their social,
political, and cultural importance. Historical development has been relying more
and more, not on these conservative elements inherited from the past, but on the
polar classes of society--i.e., the capitalist bourgeoisie and the proletariat.
The more the middle-classes lost their social importance, the less they proved
capable of playing the part of an authoritative arbitral judge in the historical
conflict between capital and labor. Yet the very considerable numerical
proportion of the town middle-classes, and still more of the peasantry, continues
to find direct expression in the electoral statistics of parliamentarism. The formal
equality of all citizens as electors thereby only gives more open indication of the
incapacity of democratic parliamentarism to settle the root questions of historical
evolution. An "equal" vote for the proletariat, the peasant, and the manager of a
trust formally placed the peasant in the position of a mediator between the two
antagonists; but, in reality, the peasantry, socially and culturally backward and
politically helpless, has in all countries always provided support for the most
reactionary, filibustering, and mercenary parties which, in the long run, always
supported capital against labor.
Absolutely contrary to all the prophecies of Bernstein, Sombart,

Tugan-Baranovsky, and others, the continued existence of the middle classes has
not softened, but has rendered to the last degree acute, the revolutionary crisis of
bourgeois society. If the proletarianization of the lower middle-classes and the
peasantry had been proceeding in a chemically purified form, the peaceful
conquest of power by the proletariat through the democratic parliamentary
apparatus would have been much more probable than we can imagine at present.
Just the fact that was seized upon by the partisans of the lower middle-class--its
longevity--has proved fatal even for the external forms of political democracy,
now that capitalism has undermined its essential foundations. Occupying in
parliamentary politics a place which it has lost in production, the middle-class
has finally compromised parliamentarism, and has transformed it into an
institution of confused chatter and legislative obstruction. From this fact alone,
there grew up before the proletariat the problem of seizing the apparatus of state
power as such, independently of the middle-class, and even against it--not
against its interests, but against its stupidity and its policy, impossible to follow
in its helpless contortions.
"Imperialism," wrote Marx of the Empire of Napoleon III, "is the most
prostituted, and, at the same time, perfected form of the state which the
bourgeoisie, having attained its fullest development, transforms into a weapon
for the enslavement of labor by capital." This definition has a wider significance
than for the French Empire alone, and includes the latest form of imperialism,
born of the world conflict between the national capitalisms of the great powers.
In the economic sphere, imperialism pre-supposed the final collapse of the rule
of the middle-class; in the political sphere, it signified the complete destruction
of democracy by means of an internal molecular transformation, and a universal
subordination of all democracy's resources to its own ends. Seizing upon all
countries, independently of their previous political history, imperialism showed
that all political prejudices were foreign to it, and that it was equally ready and
capable of making use, after their transformation and subjection, of the
monarchy of Nicholas Romanoff or Wilhelm Hohenzollern, of the presidential
autocracy of the United States of North America, and of the helplessness of a
few hundred chocolate legislators in the French parliament. The last great
slaughter--the bloody font in which the bourgeois world attempted to be
re-baptised--presented to us a picture, unparalleled in history, of the mobilization

of all state forms, systems of government, political tendencies, religious, and
schools of philosophy, in the service of imperialism. Even many of those pedants
who slept through the preparatory period of imperialist development during the
last decades, and continued to maintain a traditional attitude towards ideas of
democracy and universal suffrage, began to feel during the war that their
accustomed ideas had become fraught with some new meaning. Absolutism,
parliamentary monarchy, democracy--in the presence of imperialism (and,
consequently, in the presence of the revolution rising to take its place), all the
state forms of bourgeois supremacy, from Russian Tsarism to North American
quasi-democratic federalism, have been given equal rights, bound up in such
combinations as to supplement one another in an indivisible whole. Imperialism
succeeded by means of all the resources it had at its disposal, including
parliamentarism, irrespective of the electoral arithmetic of voting, to subordinate
for its own purposes at the critical moment the lower middle-classes of the towns
and country and even the upper layers of the proletariat. The national idea, under
the watchword of which the Third Estate rose to power, found in the imperialist
war its rebirth in the watchword of national defence. With unexpected clearness,
national ideology flamed up for the last time at the expense of class ideology.
The collapse of imperialist illusions, not only amongst the vanquished, but--after
a certain delay--amongst the victorious also, finally laid low what was once
national democracy, and, with it, its main weapon, the democratic parliament.
The flabbiness, rottenness, and helplessness of the middle-classes and their
parties everywhere became evident with terrifying clearness. In all countries the
question of the control of the State assumed first-class importance as a question
of an open measuring of forces between the capitalist clique, openly or secretly
supreme and disposing of hundreds of thousands of mobilized and hardened
officers, devoid of all scruple, and the revolting, revolutionary proletariat; while
the intermediate classes were living in a state of terror, confusion, and
prostration. Under such conditions, what pitiful nonsense are speeches about the
peaceful conquest of power by the proletariat by means of democratic
parliamentarism!
The scheme of the political situation on a world scale is quite clear. The
bourgeoisie, which has brought the nations, exhausted and bleeding to death, to
the brink of destruction--particularly the victorious bourgeoisie--has displayed
its complete inability to bring them out of their terrible situation, and, thereby, its
incompatibility with the future development of humanity. All the intermediate
political groups, including here first and foremost the social-patriotic parties, are
rotting alive. The proletariat they have deceived is turning against them more
and more every day, and is becoming strengthened in its revolutionary
convictions as the only power that can save the peoples from savagery and
destruction. However, history has not at all secured, just at this moment, a
formal parliamentary majority on the side of the party of the social revolution. In
other words, history has not transformed the nation into a debating society
solemnly voting the transition to the social revolution by a majority of votes. On
the contrary, the violent revolution has become a necessity precisely because the
imminent requirements of history are helpless to find a road through the
apparatus of parliamentary democracy. The capitalist bourgeois calculates:
"while I have in my hands lands, factories, workshops, banks; while I possess
newspapers, universities, schools; while--and this most important of all--I retain
control of the army: the apparatus of democracy, however you reconstruct it, will
remain obedient to my will. I subordinate to my interests spiritually the stupid,
conservative, characterless lower middle-class, just as it is subjected to me
materially. I oppress, and will oppress, its imagination by the gigantic scale of
my buildings, my transactions, my plans, and my crimes. For moments when it
is dissatisfied and murmurs, I have created scores of safety-valves and
lightning-conductors. At the right moment I will bring into existence opposition
parties, which will disappear to-morrow, but which to-day accomplish their
mission by affording the possibility of the lower middle-class expressing their
indignation without hurt therefrom for capitalism. I shall hold the masses of the
people, under cover of compulsory general education, on the verge of complete
ignorance, giving them no opportunity of rising above the level which my
experts in spiritual slavery consider safe. I will corrupt, deceive, and terrorize the
more privileged or the more backward of the proletariat itself. By means of these
measures, I shall not allow the vanguard of the working class to gain the ear of
the majority of the working class, while the necessary weapons of mastery and
terrorism remain in my hands."
To this the revolutionary proletarian replies: "Consequently, the first condition

of salvation is to tear the weapons of domination out of the hands of the
bourgeoisie. It is hopeless to think of a peaceful arrival to power while the
bourgeoisie retains in its hands all the apparatus of power. Three times over
hopeless is the idea of coming to power by the path which the bourgeoisie itself
indicates and, at the same time, barricades--the path of parliamentary
democracy. There is only one way: to seize power, taking away from the
bourgeoisie the material apparatus of government. Independently of the

superficial balance of forces in parliament, I shall take over for social
administration the chief forces and resources of production. I shall free the mind
of the lower middle-class from their capitalist hypnosis. I shall show them in
practice what is the meaning of Socialist production. Then even the most
backward, the most ignorant, or most terrorized sections of the nation will
support me, and willingly and intelligently will join in the work of social
construction."
When the Russian Soviet Government dissolved the Constituent Assembly, that
fact seemed to the leading Social-Democrats of Western Europe, if not the
beginning of the end of the world, at all events a rude and arbitrary break with
all the previous developments of Socialism. In reality, it was only the inevitable
outcome of the new position resulting from imperialism and the war. If Russian
Communism was the first to enter the path of casting up theoretical and practical
accounts, this was due to the same historical reasons which forced the Russian
proletariat to be the first to enter the path of the struggle for power.
All that has happened since then in Europe bears witness to the fact that we drew
the right conclusion. To imagine that democracy can be restored in its general
purity means that one is living in a pitiful, reactionary utopia.
THE METAPHYSICS OF DEMOCRACY
Feeling the historical ground shaking under his feet on the question of
democracy, Kautsky crosses to the ground of metaphysics. Instead of inquiring
into what is, he deliberates about what ought to be.
The principles of democracy--the sovereignty of the people, universal and equal

suffrage, personal liberties--appear, as presented to him, in a halo of moral duty.
They are turned from their historical meaning and presented as unalterable and
sacred things-in-themselves. This metaphysical fall from grace is not accidental.
It is instructive that the late Plekhanov, a merciless enemy of Kantism at the best
period of his activity, attempted at the end of his life, when the wave of
patriotism had washed over him, to clutch at the straw of the categorical
imperative.
That real democracy with which the German people is now making practical
acquaintance Kautsky confronts with a kind of ideal democracy, as he would
confront a common phenomenon with the thing-in-itself. Kautsky indicates with
certitude not one country in which democracy is really capable of guaranteeing a
painless transition to Socialism. But he does know, and firmly, that such
democracy ought to exist. The present German National Assembly, that organ of
helplessness, reactionary malice, and degraded solicitations, is confronted by
Kautsky with a different, real, true National Assembly, which possesses all
virtues--excepting the small virtue of reality.
The doctrine of formal democracy is not scientific Socialism, but the theory of
so-called natural law. The essence of the latter consists in the recognition of
eternal and unchanging standards of law, which among different peoples and at
different periods find a different, more or less limited and distorted expression.
The natural law of the latest history--i.e., as it emerged from the middle
ages--included first of all a protest against class privileges, the abuse of despotic
legislation, and the other "artificial" products of feudal positive law. The
theoreticians of the, as yet, weak Third Estate expressed its class interests in a
few ideal standards, which later on developed into the teaching of democracy,
acquiring at the same time an individualist character. The individual is absolute;
all persons have the right of expressing their thoughts in speech and print; every
man must enjoy equal electoral rights. As a battle cry against feudalism, the
demand for democracy had a progressive character. As time went on, however,
the metaphysics of natural law (the theory of formal democracy) began to show
its reactionary side--the establishment of an ideal standard to control the real
demands of the laboring masses and the revolutionary parties.
If we look back to the historical sequence of world concepts, the theory of

natural law will prove to be a paraphrase of Christian spiritualism freed from its
crude mysticism. The Gospels proclaimed to the slave that he had just the same
soul as the slave-owner, and in this way established the equality of all men
before the heavenly tribunal. In reality, the slave remained a slave, and
obedience became for him a religious duty. In the teaching of Christianity, the
slave found an expression for his own ignorant protest against his degraded
condition. Side by side with the protest was also the consolation. Christianity
told him:--"You have an immortal soul, although you resemble a pack-horse."
Here sounded the note of indignation. But the same Christianity
said:--"Although you are like a pack-horse, yet your immortal soul has in store
for it an eternal reward." Here is the voice of consolation. These two notes were
found in historical Christianity in different proportions at different periods and
amongst different classes. But as a whole, Christianity, like all other religions,
became a method of deadening the consciousness of the oppressed masses.
Natural law, which developed into the theory of democracy, said to the worker:
"all men are equal before the law, independently of their origin, their property,
and their position; every man has an equal right in determining the fate of the
people." This ideal criterion revolutionized the consciousness of the masses in so
far as it was a condemnation of absolutism, aristocratic privileges, and the
property qualification. But the longer it went on, the more it sent the
consciousness to sleep, legalizing poverty, slavery and degradation: for how
could one revolt against slavery when every man has an equal right in
determining the fate of the nation?
Rothschild, who has coined the blood and tears of the world into the gold
napoleons of his income, has one vote at the parliamentary elections. The
ignorant tiller of the soil who cannot sign his name, sleeps all his life without
taking his clothes off, and wanders through society like an underground mole,
plays his part, however, as a trustee of the nation's sovereignty, and is equal to
Rothschild in the courts and at the elections. In the real conditions of life, in the
economic process, in social relations, in their way of life, people became more
and more unequal; dazzling luxury was accumulated at one pole, poverty and
hopelessness at the other. But in the sphere of the legal edifice of the State, these
glaring contradictions disappeared, and there penetrated thither only
unsubstantial legal shadows. The landlord, the laborer, the capitalist, the
proletarian, the minister, the bootblack--all are equal as "citizens" and as
"legislators." The mystic equality of Christianity has taken one step down from
the heavens in the shape of the "natural," "legal" equality of democracy. But it
has not yet reached earth, where lie the economic foundations of society. For the
ignorant day-laborer, who all his life remains a beast of burden in the service of
the bourgeoisie, the ideal right to influence the fate of the nations by means of
the parliamentary elections remained little more real than the palace which he
was promised in the kingdom of heaven.
In the practical interests of the development of the working class, the Socialist
Party took its stand at a certain period on the path of parliamentarism. But this
did not mean in the slightest that it accepted in principle the metaphysical theory
of democracy, based on extra-historical, super-class rights. The proletarian

doctrines examined democracy as the instrument of bourgeois society entirely
adapted to the problems and requirements of the ruling classes; but as bourgeois
society lived by the labor of the proletariat and could not deny it the legalization
of a certain part of its class struggle without destroying itself, this gave the
Socialist Party the possibility of utilizing, at a certain period, and within certain
limits, the mechanism of democracy, without taking an oath to do so as an
unshakable principle.
The root problem of the party, at all periods of its struggle, was to create the
conditions for real, economic, living equality for mankind as members of a
united human commonwealth. It was just for this reason that the theoreticians of
the proletariat had to expose the metaphysics of democracy as a philosophic
mask for political mystification.
The democratic party at the period of its revolutionary enthusiasm, when

exposing the enslaving and stupefying lie of church dogma, preached to the
masses:--"You are lulled to sleep by promises of eternal bliss at the end of your
life, while here you have no rights and you are bound with the chains of
tyranny." The Socialist Party, a few decades later, said to the same masses with
no less right:--"You are lulled to sleep with the fiction of civic equality and
political rights, but you are deprived of the possibility of realizing those rights.
Conditional and shadowy legal equality has been transformed into the convicts'
chain with which each of you is fastened to the chariot of capitalism."
In the name of its fundamental task, the Socialist Party mobilized the masses on
the parliamentary ground as well as on others; but nowhere and at no time did
any party bind itself to bring the masses to Socialism only through the gates of
democracy. In adapting ourselves to the parliamentary regime, we stopped at a
theoretical exposure of democracy, because we were still too weak to overcome
it in practice. But the path of Socialist ideas which is visible through all
deviations, and even betrayals, foreshadows no other outcome but this: to throw
democracy aside and replace it by the mechanism of the proletariat, at the
moment when the latter is strong enough to carry out such a task.
We shall bring one piece of evidence, albeit a sufficiently striking one.

"Parliamentarism," wrote Paul Lafargue in the Russian review, Sozialdemokrat,
in 1888, "is a system of government in which the people acquires the illusion
that it is controlling the forces of the country itself, when, in reality, the actual
power is concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie--and not even of the whole
bourgeoisie, but only of certain sections of that class. In the first period of its
supremacy the bourgeoisie does not understand, or, more correctly, does not
feel, the necessity for making the people believe in the illusion of
self-government. Hence it was that all the parliamentary countries of Europe
began with a limited franchise. Everywhere the right of influencing the policy of
the country by means of the election of deputies belonged at first only to more or
less large property holders, and was only gradually extended to less substantial
citizens, until finally in some countries it became from a privilege the universal
right of all and sundry.
"In bourgeois society, the more considerable becomes the amount of social
wealth, the smaller becomes the number of individuals by whom it is
appropriated. The same takes place with power: in proportion as the mass of
citizens who possess political rights increases, and the number of elected rulers
increases, the actual power is concentrated and becomes the monopoly of a
smaller and smaller group of individuals." Such is the secret of the majority.
For the Marxist, Lafargue, parliamentarism remains as long as the supremacy of

the bourgeoisie remains. "On the day," writes Lafargue, "when the proletariat of
Europe and America seizes the State, it will have to organize a revolutionary
government, and govern society as a dictatorship, until the bourgeoisie has
disappeared as a class."
Kautsky in his time knew this Marxist estimate of parliamentarism, and more
than once repeated it himself, although with no such Gallic sharpness and
lucidity. The theoretical apostasy of Kautsky lies just in this point: having
recognized the principle of democracy as absolute and eternal, he has stepped
back from materialist dialectics to natural law. That which was exposed by
Marxism as the passing mechanism of the bourgeoisie, and was subjected only
to temporary utilization with the object of preparing the proletarian revolution,
has been newly sanctified by Kautsky as the supreme principle standing above
classes, and unconditionally subordinating to itself the methods of the
proletarian struggle. The counter-revolutionary degeneration of parliamentarism
finds its most perfect expression in the deification of democracy by the decaying
theoreticians of the Second International.
THE CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY
Speaking generally, the attainment of a majority in a democratic parliament by

the party of the proletariat is not an absolute impossibility. But such a fact, even
if it were realized, would not introduce any new principle into the course of
events. The intermediate elements of the intelligentsia, under the influence of the
parliamentary victory of the proletariat, might possibly display less resistance to
the new regime. But the fundamental resistance of the bourgeoisie would be
decided by such facts as the attitude of the army, the degree to which the
workers were armed, the situation in the neighboring states: and the civil war
would develop under the pressure of these most real circumstances, and not by
the mobile arithmetic of parliamentarism.
Our party has never refused to lead the way for proletarian dictatorship through
the gates of democracy, having clearly summed up in its mind certain agitational
and political advantages of such a "legalized" transition to the new regime.
Hence, our attempt to call the Constituent Assembly. The Russian peasant, only
just awakened by the revolution to political life, found himself face to face with
half a dozen parties, each of which apparently had made up its mind to confuse
his mind. The Constituent Assembly placed itself across the path of the
revolutionary movement, and was swept aside.
The opportunist majority in the Constituent Assembly represented only the

political reflection of the mental confusion and indecision which reigned amidst
the middle-classes in the town and country and amidst the more backward
elements of the proletariat. If we take the viewpoint of isolated historical
possibilities, one might say that it would have been more painless if the
Constituent Assembly had worked for a year or two, had finally discredited the
Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks by their connection with the
Cadets, and had thereby led to the formal majority of the Bolsheviks, showing
the masses that in reality only two forces existed: the revolutionary proletariat,
led by the Communists, and the counter-revolutionary democracy, headed by the
generals and the admirals. But the point is that the pulse of the internal relations
of the revolution was beating not at all in time with the pulse of the development
of its external relations. If our party had thrown all responsibility on to the
objective formula of "the course of events" the development of military
operations might have forestalled us. German imperialism might have seized
Petrograd, the evacuation of which the Kerensky Government had already
begun. The fall of Petrograd would at that time have meant a death-blow to the
proletariat, for all the best forces of the revolution were concentrated there, in
the Baltic Fleet and in the Red capital.
*****
Our party may be accused, therefore, not of going against the course of historical
development, but of having taken at a stride several political steps. It stepped
over the heads of the Mensheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionaries, in order not
to allow German imperialism to step across the head of the Russian proletariat
and conclude peace with the Entente on the back of the revolution before it was
able to spread its wings over the whole world.
From the above it will not be difficult to deduce the answers to the two questions
with which Kautsky pestered us. Firstly: Why did we summon the Constituent
Assembly when we had in view the dictatorship of the proletariat? Secondly: If
the first Constituent Assembly which we summoned proved backward and not in
harmony with the interests of the revolution, why did we reject the idea of a new
Assembly? The thought at the back of Kautsky's mind is that we repudiated
democracy, not on the ground of principle, but only because it proved against us.
In order to seize this insinuation by its long ears, let us establish the facts.
The watchword, "All power to the Soviets," was put forward by our Party at the
very beginning of the revolution--i.e., long before, not merely the decree as to
the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, but the decree as to its convocation.
True, we did not set up the Soviets in opposition to the future Constituent
Assembly, the summoning of which was constantly postponed by the
Government of Kerensky, and consequently became more and more
problematical. But in any case, we did not consider the Constituent Assembly,
after the manner of the democrats, as the future master of the Russian land, who
would come and settle everything. We explained to the masses that the Soviets,
the revolutionary organizations of the laboring masses themselves, can and must
become the true masters. If we did not formally repudiate the Constituent
Assembly beforehand, it was only because it stood in contrast, not to the power
of the Soviets, but to the power of Kerensky himself, who, in his turn, was only a
screen for the bourgeoisie. At the same time we did decide beforehand that, if, in
the Constituent Assembly, the majority proved in our favor, that body must
dissolve itself and hand over the power to the Soviets--as later on the Petrograd
Town Council did, elected as it was on the basis of the most democratic electoral
franchise. In my book on the October Revolution, I tried to explain the reasons
which made the Constituent Assembly the out-of-date reflection of an epoch
through which the revolution had already passed. As we saw the organization of
revolutionary power only in the Soviets, and at the moment of the summoning of
the Constituent Assembly the Soviets were already the de facto power, the
question was inevitably decided for us in the sense of the violent dissolution of
the Constituent Assembly, since it would not dissolve itself in favor of the
Government of the Soviets.
"But why," asks Kautsky, "did you not summon a new Constituent Assembly?"
Because we saw no need for it. If the first Constituent Assembly could still play
a fleeting progressive part, conferring a sanction upon the Soviet regime in its
first days, convincing for the middle-class elements, now, after two years of
victorious proletarian dictatorship and the complete collapse of all democratic
attempts in Siberia, on the shores of the White Sea, in the Ukraine, and in the
Caucasus, the power of the Soviets truly does not need the blessing of the faded
authority of the Constituent Assembly. "Are we not right in that case to
conclude," asks Kautsky in the tone of Lloyd George, "that the Soviet
Government rules by the will of the minority, since it avoids testing its
supremacy by universal suffrage?" Here is a blow that misses its mark.
If the parliamentary regime, even in the period of "peaceful," stable

development, was a rather crude method of discovering the opinion of the
country, and in the epoch of revolutionary storm completely lost its capacity to
follow the course of the struggle and the development of revolutionary
consciousness, the Soviet regime, which is more closely, straightly, honestly
bound up with the toiling majority of the people, does achieve meaning, not in
statically reflecting a majority, but in dynamically creating it. Having taken its
stand on the path of revolutionary dictatorship, the working class of Russia has
thereby declared that it builds its policy in the period of transition, not on the
shadowy art of rivalry with chameleon-hued parties in the chase for peasant
votes, but on the actual attraction of the peasant masses, side by side with the
proletariat, into the work of ruling the country in the real interests of the laboring
masses. Such democracy goes a little deeper down than parliamentarism.
To-day, when the main problem--the question of life and death--of the revolution
consists in the military repulse of the various attacks of the White Guard bands,
does Kautsky imagine that any form of parliamentary "majority" is capable of
guaranteeing a more energetic, devoted, and successful organization of
revolutionary defence? The conditions of the struggle are so defined, in a
revolutionary country throttled by the criminal ring of the blockade, that all the
middle-class groups are confronted only with the alternative of Denikin or the
Soviet Government. What further proof is needed when even parties, which
stand for compromise in principle, like the Mensheviks and the
Socialist-Revolutionaries, have split along that very line?
When suggesting to us the election of a Constituent Assembly, does Kautsky

propose the stopping of the civil war for the purpose of the elections? By whose
decision? If he intends for this purpose to bring into motion the authority of the
Second International, we hasten to inform him that that institution enjoys in
Denikin's camp only a little more authority than it does in ours. But to the extent
that the civil war between the Workers' and Peasants' Army and the imperialist
bands is still going on, the elections must of necessity be limited to Soviet
territory. Does Kautsky desire to insist that we should allow the parties which
support Denikin to come out into the open? Empty and contemptible chatter!
There is not one government, at any time and under any conditions, which would
allow its enemies to mobilize hostile forces in the rear of its armies.
A not unimportant place in the discussion of the question is occupied by the fact
that the flower of the laboring population is at present on active service. The
foremost workers and the most class-conscious peasants, who take the first place
at all elections, as in all important political activities, directing the public opinion
of the workers, are at present fighting and dying as commanders, commissars, or
rank and file in the Red Army. If the most "democratic" governments in the
bourgeois states, whose regime is founded on parliamentarism, consider it
impossible to carry on elections to parliament in wartime, it is all the more
senseless to demand such elections during the war of the Soviet Republic, the
regime of which is not for one moment founded on parliamentarism. It is quite
sufficient that the revolutionary government of Russia, in the most difficult
months and times, never stood in the way of periodic re-elections of its own
elective institutions--the local and central Soviets.
Finally, as a last argument--the last and the least--we have to present to the
notice of Kautsky that even the Russian Kautskians, the Mensheviks like Martov
and Dan, do not consider it possible to put forward at the present moment a
demand for a Constituent Assembly, postponing it to better times in the future.
Will there be any need of it then? Of this one may be permitted to doubt. When
the civil war is over, the dictatorship of the working class will disclose all its
creative energy, and will, in practice, show the most backward masses what it
can give them. By means of a systematically applied universal labor service, and
a centralized organization of distribution, the whole population of the country
will be drawn into the general Soviet system of economic arrangement and
self-government. The Soviets themselves, at present the organs of government,
will gradually melt into purely economic organizations. Under such conditions it
is doubtful whether any one will think of erecting, over the real fabric of
Socialist society, an archaic crown in the shape of the Constituent Assembly,
which would only have to register the fact that everything necessary has already
been "constituted" before it and without it.[3]
[3] In order to charm us in favor of a Constituent Assembly Kautsky brings

forward an argument based on the rate of exchange to the assistance of his
argument, based on the categorical imperative. "Russia requires," he writes, "the
help of foreign capital, but this help will not come to the Soviet Republic if the
latter does not summon a Constituent Assembly, and does not give freedom of
the Press; not because the capitalists are democratic idealists--to Tsarism they
gave without any hesitation many milliards--but because they have no business
faith in a revolutionary government." (Page 218.)
There are scraps of truth in this rubbish. The Stock Exchange did really support
the government of Kolchak when it relied for support on the Constituent
Assembly. From its experience of Kolchak the Stock Exchange became
confirmed in its conviction that the mechanism of bourgeois democracy can be
utilized in capitalist interests, and then thrown aside like a worn-out pair of
puttees. It is quite possible that the Stock Exchange would again give a
parliamentary loan on the guarantee of a Constituent Assembly, believing, on the
basis of its former experience, that such a body would prove only an
intermediate step to capitalist dictatorship. We do not propose to buy the
"business faith" of the Stock Exchange at such a price, and decidedly prefer the
"faith" which is aroused in the realist Stock Exchange by the weapon of the Red
Army.
TERRORISM
The chief theme of Kautsky's book is terrorism. The view that terrorism is of the
essence of revolution Kautsky proclaims to be a widespread delusion. It is untrue
that he who desires revolution must put up with terrorism. As far as he, Kautsky,
is concerned, he is, generally speaking, for revolution, but decidedly against
terrorism. From there, however, complications begin.
"The revolution brings us," Kautsky complains, "a bloody terrorism carried out
by Socialist governments. The Bolsheviks in Russia first stepped on to this path,
and were, consequently, sternly condemned by all Socialists who had not
adopted the Bolshevik point of view, including the Socialists of the German
Majority. But as soon as the latter found themselves threatened in their
supremacy, they had recourse to the methods of the same terrorist regime which
they attacked in the East." (Page 9.) It would seem that from this follows the
conclusion that terrorism is much more profoundly bound up with the nature of
revolution than certain sages think. But Kautsky makes an absolutely opposite
conclusion. The gigantic development of White and Red terrorism in all the last
revolutions--the Russian, the German, the Austrian, and the Hungarian--is
evidence to him that these revolutions turned aside from their true path and
turned out to be not the revolution they ought to have been according to the
theoretical visions of Kautsky. Without going into the question whether
terrorism "as such" is "immanent" to the revolution "as such," let us consider a
few of the revolutions as they pass before us in the living history of mankind.
Let us first regard the religious Reformation, which proved the watershed
between the Middle Ages and modern history: the deeper were the interests of
the masses that it involved, the wider was its sweep, the more fiercely did the
civil war develop under the religious banner, and the more merciless did the
terror become on the other side.
In the seventeenth century England carried out two revolutions. The first, which
brought forth great social upheavals and wars, brought amongst other things the
execution of King Charles I, while the second ended happily with the accession
of a new dynasty. The British bourgeoisie and its historians maintain quite
different attitudes to these two revolutions: the first is for them a rising of the
mob--the "Great Rebellion"; the second has been handed down under the title of
the "Glorious Revolution." The reason for this difference in estimates was
explained by the French historian, Augustin Thierry. In the first English
revolution, in the "Great Rebellion," the active force was the people; while in the
second it was almost "silent." Hence, it follows that, in surroundings of class
slavery, it is difficult to teach the oppressed masses good manners. When
provoked to fury they use clubs, stones, fire, and the rope. The court historians
of the exploiters are offended at this. But the great event in modern "bourgeois"
history is, none the less, not the "Glorious Revolution," but the "Great
Rebellion."
The greatest event in modern history after the Reformation and the "Great
Rebellion," and far surpassing its two predecessors in significance, was the great
French Revolution of the eighteenth century. To this classical revolution there
was a corresponding classical terrorism. Kautsky is ready to forgive the
terrorism of the Jacobins, acknowledging that they had no other way of saving
the republic. But by this justification after the event no one is either helped or
hindered. The Kautskies of the end of the eighteenth century (the leaders of the
French Girondists) saw in the Jacobins the personification of evil. Here is a
comparison, sufficiently instructive in its banality, between the Jacobins and the
Girondists from the pen of one of the bourgeois French historians: "Both one
side and the other desired the republic." But the Girondists "desired a free, legal,
and merciful republic. The Montagnards desired a despotic and terrorist republic.
Both stood for the supreme power of the people; but the Girondist justly
understood all by the people, while the Montagnards considered only the
working class to be the people. That was why only to such persons, in the
opinion of the Montagnards, did the supremacy belong." The antithesis between
the noble champions of the Constituent Assembly and the bloodthirsty agents of
the revolutionary dictatorship is here outlined fairly clearly, although in the
political terms of the epoch.
The iron dictatorship of the Jacobins was evoked by the monstrously difficult
position of revolutionary France. Here is what the bourgeois historian says of
this period: "Foreign troops had entered French territory from four sides. In the
north, the British and the Austrians, in Alsace, the Prussians, in Dauphine and up
to Lyons, the Piedmontese, in Roussillon the Spaniards. And this at a time, when
civil war was raging at four different points: in Normandy, in the Vendée, at
Lyons, and at Toulon." (Page 176). To this we must add internal enemies in the
form of numerous secret supporters of the old regime, ready by all methods to
assist the enemy.
The severity of the proletarian dictatorship in Russia, let us point out here, was
conditioned by no less difficult circumstances. There was one continuous front,
on the north and south, in the east and west. Besides the Russian White Guard
armies of Kolchak, Denikin and others, there are attacking Soviet Russia,
simultaneously or in turn: Germans, Austrians, Czecho-Slovaks, Serbs, Poles,
Ukrainians, Roumanians, French, British, Americans, Japanese, Finns,
Esthonians, Lithuanians.... In a country throttled by a blockade and strangled by
hunger, there are conspiracies, risings, terrorist acts, and destruction of roads and
bridges.
"The government which had taken on itself the struggle with countless external
and internal enemies had neither money, nor sufficient troops, nor anything
except boundless energy, enthusiastic support on the part of the revolutionary
elements of the country, and the gigantic courage to take all measures necessary
for the safety of the country, however arbitrary and severe they were." In such
words did once upon a time Plekhanov describe the government of
the--Jacobins. (Sozial-demokrat, a quarterly review of literature and politics.
Book I, February, 1890, London. The article on "The Centenary of the Great
Revolution," pages 6-7).
Let us now turn to the revolution which took place in the second half of the
nineteenth century, in the country of "democracy"--in the United States of North
America. Although the question was not the abolition of property altogether, but
only of the abolition of property in negroes, nevertheless, the institutions of
democracy proved absolutely powerless to decide the argument in a peaceful
way. The southern states, defeated at the presidential elections in 1860, decided
by all possible means to regain the influence they had hitherto exerted in the
question of slave-owning; and uttering, as was right, the proper sounding words
about freedom and independence, rose in a slave-owners' insurrection. Hence
inevitably followed all the later consequences of civil war. At the very beginning
of the struggle, the military government in Baltimore imprisoned in Fort
MacHenry a few citizens, sympathizers with the slave-holding South, in spite of
Habeas Corpus. The question of the lawfulness or the unlawfulness of such
action became the object of fierce disputes between so-called "high authorities."
The judge of the Supreme Court, decided that the President had neither the right
to arrest the operation of Habeas Corpus nor to give plenipotentiary powers to
that end to the military authorities. "Such, in all probability, is the correct
Constitutional solution of the question," says one of the first historians of the
American Civil War. "But the state of affairs was to such a degree critical, and
the necessity of taking decisive measures against the population of Baltimore so
great, that not only the Government but the people of the United States also
supported the most energetic measures."[4]
[4] (The History of the American War, by Fletcher, Lieut.-Colonel in the Scots
Guards, St. Petersburg, 1867, page 95.)
Some goods that the rebellious South required were secretly supplied by the
merchants of the North. Naturally, the Northerners had no other course but to
introduce methods of repression. On August 6, 1861, the President confirmed a
resolution of Congress as to "the confiscation of property used for
insurrectionary purposes." The people, in the shape of the most democratic
elements, were in favor of extreme measures. The Republican Party had a
decided majority in the North, and persons suspected of secessionism, i.e., of
sympathizing with the rebellious Southern states, were subjected to violence. In
some northern towns, and even in the states of New England, famous for their
order, the people frequently burst into the offices of newspapers which supported
the revolting slave-owners and smashed their printing presses. It occasionally
happened that reactionary publishers were smeared with tar, decorated with
feathers, and carried in such array through the public squares until they swore an
oath of loyalty to the Union. The personality of a planter smeared in tar bore
little resemblance to the "end-in-itself;" so that the categorical imperative of
Kautsky suffered in the civil war of the states a considerable blow. But this is not
all. "The government, on its part," the historian tells us, "adopted repressive
measures of various kinds against publications holding views opposed to its
own: and in a short time the hitherto free American press was reduced to a
condition scarcely superior to that prevailing in the autocratic European
States." The same fate overtook the freedom of speech. "In this way,"
Lieut.-Colonel Fletcher continues, "the American people at this time denied
itself the greater part of its freedom. It should be observed," he moralizes, "that
the majority of the people was to such an extent occupied with the war, and to
such a degree imbued with the readiness for any kind of sacrifice to attain its
end, that it not only did not regret its vanished liberties, but scarcely even
noticed their disappearance."[5]
[5] Fletcher's History of the American War, pages 162-164.
Infinitely more ruthlessly did the bloodthirsty slave-owners of the South employ
their uncontrollable hordes. "Wherever there was a majority in favor of slavery,"
writes the Count of Paris, "public opinion behaved despotically to the minority.
All who expressed pity for the national banner ... were forced to be silent. But
soon this itself became insufficient; as in all revolutions, the indifferent were
forced to express their loyalty to the new order of things.... Those who did not
agree to this were given up as a sacrifice to the hatred and violence of the mass
of the people.... In each centre of growing civilization (South-Western states)
vigilance committees were formed, composed of all those who had been
distinguished by their extreme views in the electoral struggle.... A tavern was the
usual place of their sessions, and a noisy orgy was mingled with a contemptible
parody of public forms of justice. A few madmen sitting around a desk on which
gin and whisky flowed judged their present and absent fellow citizens. The
accused, even before having been questioned, could see the rope being prepared.
He who did not appear at the court learned his sentence when falling under the
bullets of the executioner concealed in the forest...." This picture is extremely
reminiscent of the scenes which day by day took place in the camps of Denikin,
Kolchak, Yudenich, and the other heroes of Anglo-Franco-American
"democracy."
We shall see later how the question of terrorism stood in regard to the Paris
Commune of 1871. In any case, the attempts of Kautsky to contrast the
Commune with us are false at their very root, and only bring the author to a
juggling with words of the most petty character.
The institution of hostages apparently must be recognized as "immanent" in the

terrorism of the civil war. Kautsky is against terrorism and against the institution
of hostages, but in favor of the Paris Commune. (N.B.--The Commune existed
fifty years ago.) Yet the Commune took hostages. A difficulty arises. But what
does the art of exegesis exist for?
The decree of the Commune concerning hostages and their execution in reply to
the atrocities of the Versaillese arose, according to the profound explanation of
Kautsky, "from a striving to preserve human life, not to destroy it." A
marvellous discovery! It only requires to be developed. It could, and must, be

explained that in the civil war we destroyed White Guards in order that they
should not destroy the workers. Consequently, our problem is not the destruction
of human life, but its preservation. But as we have to struggle for the
preservation of human life with arms in our hands, it leads to the destruction of
human life--a puzzle the dialectical secret of which was explained by old Hegel,
without reckoning other still more ancient sages.
The Commune could maintain itself and consolidate its position only by a
determined struggle with the Versaillese. The latter, on the other hand, had a
large number of agents in Paris. Fighting with the agents of Thiers, the
Commune could not abstain from destroying the Versaillese at the front and in
the rear. If its rule had crossed the bounds of Paris, in the provinces it would
have found--during the process of the civil war with the Army of the National
Assembly--still more determined foes in the midst of the peaceful population.
The Commune when fighting the royalists could not allow freedom of speech to
royalist agents in the rear.
Kautsky, in spite of all the happenings in the world to-day, completely fails to
realize what war is in general, and the civil war in particular. He does not
understand that every, or nearly every, sympathizer with Thiers in Paris was not
merely an "opponent" of the Communards in ideas, but an agent and spy of
Thiers, a ferocious enemy ready to shoot one in the back. The enemy must be
made harmless, and in wartime this means that he must be destroyed.
The problem of revolution, as of war, consists in breaking the will of the foe,
forcing him to capitulate and to accept the conditions of the conqueror. The will,
of course, is a fact of the physical world, but in contradistinction to a meeting, a
dispute, or a congress, the revolution carries out its object by means of the
employment of material resources--though to a less degree than war. The
bourgeoisie itself conquered power by means of revolts, and consolidated it by
the civil war. In the peaceful period, it retains power by means of a system of
repression. As long as class society, founded on the most deep-rooted
antagonisms, continues to exist, repression remains a necessary means of
breaking the will of the opposing side.
Even if, in one country or another, the dictatorship of the proletariat grew up
within the external framework of democracy, this would by no means avert the
civil war. The question as to who is to rule the country, i.e., of the life or death
of the bourgeoisie, will be decided on either side, not by references to the
paragraphs of the constitution, but by the employment of all forms of violence.
However deeply Kautsky goes into the question of the food of the
anthropopithecus (see page 122 et seq. of his book) and other immediate and
remote conditions which determine the cause of human cruelty, he will find in
history no other way of breaking the class will of the enemy except the
systematic and energetic use of violence.
The degree of ferocity of the struggle depends on a series of internal and

international circumstances. The more ferocious and dangerous is the resistance
of the class enemy who have been overthrown, the more inevitably does the
system of repression take the form of a system of terror.
But here Kautsky unexpectedly takes up a new position in his struggle with
Soviet terrorism. He simply waves aside all reference to the ferocity of the
counter-revolutionary opposition of the Russian bourgeoisie.
"Such ferocity," he says, "could not be noticed in November, 1917, in Petrograd

and Moscow, and still less more recently in Budapest." (Page 149.) With such a
happy formulation of the question, revolutionary terrorism merely proves to be a
product of the blood-thirstiness of the Bolsheviks, who simultaneously
abandoned the traditions of the vegetarian anthropopithecus and the moral
lessons of Kautsky.
The first conquest of power by the Soviets at the beginning of November, 1917
(new style), was actually accomplished with insignificant sacrifices. The Russian
bourgeoisie found itself to such a degree estranged from the masses of the
people, so internally helpless, so compromised by the course and the result of the
war, so demoralized by the regime of Kerensky, that it scarcely dared show any
resistance. In Petrograd the power of Kerensky was overthrown almost without a
fight. In Moscow its resistance was dragged out, mainly owing to the indecisive
character of our own actions. In the majority of the provincial towns, power was
transferred to the Soviet on the mere receipt of a telegram from Petrograd or
Moscow. If the matter had ended there, there would have been no word of the
Red Terror. But in November, 1917, there was already evidence of the beginning
of the resistance of the propertied classes. True, there was required the
intervention of the imperialist governments of the West in order to give the
Russian counter-revolution faith in itself, and to add ever-increasing power to its

resistance. This can be shown from facts, both important and insignificant, day
by day during the whole epoch of the Soviet revolution.
Kerensky's "Staff" felt no support forthcoming from the mass of the soldiery,
and was inclined to recognize the Soviet Government, which had begun
negotiations for an armistice with the Germans. But there followed the protest of
the military missions of the Entente, followed by open threats. The Staff was
frightened; incited by "Allied" officers, it entered the path of opposition. This led
to armed conflict and to the murder of the chief of the field staff, General
Dukhonin, by a group of revolutionary sailors.
In Petrograd, the official agents of the Entente, especially the French Military
Mission, hand in hand with the S.R.s and the Mensheviks, openly organized the
opposition, mobilizing, arming, inciting against us the cadets, and the bourgeois
youth generally, from the second day of the Soviet revolution. The rising of the
junkers on November 10 brought about a hundred times more victims than the
revolution of November 7. The campaign of the adventurers Kerensky and
Krasnov against Petrograd, organized at the same time by the Entente, naturally
introduced into the struggle the first elements of savagery. Nevertheless, General
Krasnov was set free on his word of honor. The Yaroslav rising (in the summer
of 1918) which involved so many victims, was organized by Savinkov on the
instructions of the French Embassy, and with its resources. Archangel was
captured according to the plans of British naval agents, with the help of British
warships and aeroplanes. The beginning of the empire of Kolchak, the nominee
of the American Stock Exchange, was brought about by the foreign
Czecho-Slovak Corps maintained by the resources of the French Government.
Kaledin and Krasnov (liberated by us), the first leaders of the counter-revolution
on the Don, could enjoy partial success only thanks to the open military and
financial aid of Germany. In the Ukraine the Soviet power was overthrown in the
beginning of 1918 by German militarism. The Volunteer Army of Denikin was
created with the financial and technical help of Great Britain and France. Only in
the hope of British intervention and of British military support was Yudenich's
army created. The politicians, the diplomats, and the journalists of the Entente
have for two years on end been debating with complete frankness the question of
whether the financing of the civil war in Russia is a sufficiently profitable
enterprise. In such circumstances, one needs truly a brazen forehead to seek the
reason for the sanguinary character of the civil war in Russia in the malevolence
of the Bolsheviks, and not in the international situation.
The Russian proletariat was the first to enter the path of the social revolution,
and the Russian bourgeoisie, politically helpless, was emboldened to struggle
against its political and economic expropriation only because it saw its elder
sister in all countries still in power, and still maintaining economic, political,
and, to a certain extent, military supremacy.
If our November revolution had taken place a few months, or even a few weeks,
after the establishment of the rule of the proletariat in Germany, France, and
England, there can be no doubt that our revolution would have been the most
"peaceful," the most "bloodless" of all possible revolutions on this sinful earth.
But this historical sequence--the most "natural" at the first glance, and, in any
case, the most beneficial for the Russian working class--found itself
infringed--not through our fault, but through the will of events. Instead of being
the last, the Russian proletariat proved to be the first. It was just this
circumstance, after the first period of confusion, that imparted desperation to the
character of the resistance of the classes which had ruled in Russia previously,
and forced the Russian proletariat, in a moment of the greatest peril, foreign
attacks, and internal plots and insurrections, to have recourse to severe measures
of State terror. No one will now say that those measures proved futile. But,
perhaps, we are expected to consider them "intolerable"?
The working class, which seized power in battle, had as its object and its duty to
establish that power unshakeably, to guarantee its own supremacy beyond
question, to destroy its enemies' hankering for a new revolution, and thereby to
make sure of carrying out Socialist reforms. Otherwise there would be no point
in seizing power.
The revolution "logically" does not demand terrorism, just as "logically" it does
not demand an armed insurrection. What a profound commonplace! But the
revolution does require of the revolutionary class that it should attain its end by
all methods at its disposal--if necessary, by an armed rising: if required, by
terrorism. A revolutionary class which has conquered power with arms in its
hands is bound to, and will, suppress, rifle in hand, all attempts to tear the power
out of its hands. Where it has against it a hostile army, it will oppose to it its own
army. Where it is confronted with armed conspiracy, attempt at murder, or
rising, it will hurl at the heads of its enemies an unsparing penalty. Perhaps
Kautsky has invented other methods? Or does he reduce the whole question to
the degree of repression, and recommend in all circumstances imprisonment
instead of execution?
The question of the form of repression, or of its degree, of course, is not one of
"principle." It is a question of expediency. In a revolutionary period, the party
which has been thrown from power, which does not reconcile itself with the
stability of the ruling class, and which proves this by its desperate struggle
against the latter, cannot be terrorized by the threat of imprisonment, as it does
not believe in its duration. It is just this simple but decisive fact that explains the
widespread recourse to shooting in a civil war.
Or, perhaps, Kautsky wishes to say that execution is not expedient, that "classes
cannot be cowed." This is untrue. Terror is helpless--and then only "in the long
run"--if it is employed by reaction against a historically rising class. But terror
can be very efficient against a reactionary class which does not want to leave the
scene of operations. Intimidation is a powerful weapon of policy, both
internationally and internally. War, like revolution, is founded upon
intimidation. A victorious war, generally speaking, destroys only an insignificant
part of the conquered army, intimidating the remainder and breaking their will.
The revolution works in the same way: it kills individuals, and intimidates
thousands. In this sense, the Red Terror is not distinguishable from the armed
insurrection, the direct continuation of which it represents. The State terror of a
revolutionary class can be condemned "morally" only by a man who, as a
principle, rejects (in words) every form of violence whatsoever--consequently,
every war and every rising. For this one has to be merely and simply a
hypocritical Quaker.
"But, in that case, in what do your tactics differ from the tactics of Tsarism?" we
are asked, by the high priests of Liberalism and Kautskianism.
You do not understand this, holy men? We shall explain to you. The terror of
Tsarism was directed against the proletariat. The gendarmerie of Tsarism
throttled the workers who were fighting for the Socialist order. Our
Extraordinary Commissions shoot landlords, capitalists, and generals who are
striving to restore the capitalist order. Do you grasp this ... distinction? Yes? For
us Communists it is quite sufficient.
"FREEDOM OF THE PRESS"
One point particularly worries Kautsky, the author of a great many books and
articles--the freedom of the Press. Is it permissible to suppress newspapers?
During war all institutions and organs of the State and of public opinion become,
directly or indirectly, weapons of warfare. This is particularly true of the Press.
No government carrying on a serious war will allow publications to exist on its
territory which, openly or indirectly, support the enemy. Still more so in a civil
war. The nature of the latter is such that each of the struggling sides has in the
rear of its armies considerable circles of the population on the side of the enemy.
In war, where both success and failure are repaid by death, hostile agents who
penetrate into the rear are subject to execution. This is inhumane, but no one
ever considered war a school of humanity--still less civil war. Can it be seriously
demanded that, during a civil war with the White Guards of Denikin, the
publications of parties supporting Denikin should come out unhindered in
Moscow and Petrograd? To propose this in the name of the "freedom" of the
Press is just the same as, in the name of open dealing, to demand the publication
of military secrets. "A besieged city," wrote a Communard, Arthur Arnould of
Paris, "cannot permit within its midst that hopes for its fall should openly be
expressed, that the fighters defending it should be incited to treason, that the
movements of its troops should be communicated to the enemy. Such was the
position of Paris under the Commune." Such is the position of the Soviet
Republic during the two years of its existence.
Let us, however, listen to what Kautsky has to say in this connection.
"The justification of this system (i.e., repressions in connection with the Press) is
reduced to the naive idea that an absolute truth (!) exists, and that only the
Communists possess it (!). Similarly," continues Kautsky, "it reduces itself to
another point of view, that all writers are by nature liars (!) and that only
Communists are fanatics for truth (!). In reality, liars and fanatics for what they
consider truth are to be found in all camps." And so on, and so on, and so on.
(Page 176.)
In this way, in Kautsky's eyes, the revolution, in its most acute phase, when it is
a question of the life and death of classes, continues as hitherto to be a literary
discussion with the object of establishing ... the truth. What profundity!... Our
"truth," of course, is not absolute. But as in its name we are, at the present
moment, shedding our blood, we have neither cause nor possibility to carry on a
literary discussion as to the relativity of truth with those who "criticize" us with
the help of all forms of arms. Similarly, our problem is not to punish liars and to
encourage just men amongst journalists of all shades of opinion, but to throttle
the class lie of the bourgeoisie and to achieve the class truth of the proletariat,
irrespective of the fact that in both camps there are fanatics and liars.
"The Soviet Government," Kautsky thunders, "has destroyed the sole remedy
that might militate against corruption: the freedom of the Press. Control by
means of unlimited freedom of the Press alone could have restrained those
bandits and adventurers who will inevitably cling like leeches to every
unlimited, uncontrolled power." (Page 188.) And so on.
The Press as a trusty weapon of the struggle with corruption! This liberal recipe
sounds particularly pitiful when one remembers the two countries with the
greatest "freedom" of the Press--North America and France--which, at the same
time, are countries of the most highly developed stage of capitalist corruption.
Feeding on the old scandal of the political ante-rooms of the Russian revolution,
Kautsky imagines that without Cadet and Menshevik freedom the Soviet
apparatus is honey-combed with "bandits" and "adventurers." Such was the
voice of the Mensheviks a year or eighteen months ago. Now even they will not
dare to repeat this. With the help of Soviet control and party selection, the Soviet
Government, in the intense atmosphere of the struggle, has dealt with the bandits
and adventurers who appeared on the surface at the moment of the revolution
incomparably better than any government whatsoever, at any time whatsoever.
We are fighting. We are fighting a life-and-death struggle. The Press is a weapon

not of an abstract society, but of two irreconcilable, armed and contending sides.
We are destroying the Press of the counter-revolution, just as we destroyed its
fortified positions, its stores, its communications, and its intelligence system.
Are we depriving ourselves of Cadet and Menshevik criticisms of the corruption
of the working class? In return we are victoriously destroying the very
foundations of capitalist corruption.
But Kautsky goes further to develop his theme. He complains that we suppress
the newspapers of the S.R.s and the Mensheviks, and even--such things have
been known--arrest their leaders. Are we not dealing here with "shades of
opinion" in the proletarian or the Socialist movement? The scholastic pedant
does not see facts beyond his accustomed words. The Mensheviks and S.R.s for
him are simply tendencies in Socialism, whereas, in the course of the revolution,
they have been transformed into an organization which works in active
co-operation with the counter-revolution and carries on against us an open war.
The army of Kolchak was organized by Socialist Revolutionaries (how that
name savours to-day of the charlatan!), and was supported by Mensheviks. Both
carried on--and carry on--against us, for a year and a half, a war on the Northern
front. The Mensheviks who rule the Caucasus, formerly the allies of
Hohenzollern, and to-day the allies of Lloyd George, arrested and shot
Bolsheviks hand in hand with German and British officers. The Mensheviks and
S.R.s of the Kuban Rada organized the army of Denikin. The Esthonian
Mensheviks who participate in their government were directly concerned in the
last advance of Yudenich against Petrograd. Such are these "tendencies" in the
Socialist movement. Kautsky considers that one can be in a state of open and
civil war with the Mensheviks and S.R.s, who, with the help of the troops they
themselves have organized for Yudenich, Kolchak and Denikin, are fighting for
their "shade of opinions" in Socialism, and at the same time to allow those
innocent "shades of opinion" freedom of the Press in our rear. If the dispute with
the S.R.s and the Mensheviks could be settled by means of persuasion and
voting--that is, if there were not behind their backs the Russian and foreign
imperialists--there would be no civil war.
Kautsky, of course, is ready to "condemn"--an extra drop of ink--the blockade,

and the Entente support of Denikin, and the White Terror. But in his high
impartiality he cannot refuse the latter certain extenuating circumstances. The
White Terror, you see, does not infringe their own principles, while the
Bolsheviks, making use of the Red Terror, betray the principle of "the
sacredness of human life which they themselves proclaimed." (Page 210.)
What is the meaning of the principle of the sacredness of human life in practice,
and in what does it differ from the commandment, "Thou shalt not kill," Kautsky
does not explain. When a murderer raises his knife over a child, may one kill the
murderer to save the child? Will not thereby the principle of the "sacredness of
human life" be infringed? May one kill the murderer to save oneself? Is an
insurrection of oppressed slaves against their masters permissible? Is it
permissible to purchase one's freedom at the cost of the life of one's jailers? If
human life in general is sacred and inviolable, we must deny ourselves not only
the use of terror, not only war, but also revolution itself. Kautsky simply does
not realize the counter-revolutionary meaning of the "principle" which he
attempts to force upon us. Elsewhere we shall see that Kautsky accuses us of
concluding the Brest-Litovsk peace: in his opinion we ought to have continued
war. But what then becomes of the sacredness of human life? Does life cease to
be sacred when it is a question of people talking another language, or does
Kautsky consider that mass murders organized on principles of strategy and
tactics are not murders at all? Truly it is difficult to put forward in our age a
principle more hypocritical and more stupid. As long as human labor-power,
and, consequently, life itself, remain articles of sale and purchase, of exploitation
and robbery, the principle of the "sacredness of human life" remains a shameful
lie, uttered with the object of keeping the oppressed slaves in their chains.
We used to fight against the death penalty introduced by Kerensky, because that
penalty was inflicted by the courts-martial of the old army on soldiers who
refused to continue the imperialist war. We tore this weapon out of the hands of
the old courts-martial, destroyed the courts-martial themselves, and demobilized
the old army which had brought them forth. Destroying in the Red Army, and
generally throughout the country, counter-revolutionary conspirators who strive
by means of insurrections, murders, and disorganization, to restore the old
regime, we are acting in accordance with the iron laws of a war in which we
desire to guarantee our victory.
If it is a question of seeking formal contradictions, then obviously we must do so

on the side of the White Terror, which is the weapon of classes which consider
themselves "Christian," patronize idealist philosophy, and are firmly convinced
that the individuality (their own) is an end-in-itself. As for us, we were never
concerned with the Kantian-priestly and vegetarian-Quaker prattle about the
"sacredness of human life." We were revolutionaries in opposition, and have
remained revolutionaries in power. To make the individual sacred we must
destroy the social order which crucifies him. And this problem can only be
solved by blood and iron.
There is another difference between the White Terror and the Red, which
Kautsky to-day ignores, but which in the eyes of a Marxist is of decisive
significance. The White Terror is the weapon of the historically reactionary
class. When we exposed the futility of the repressions of the bourgeois State
against the proletariat, we never denied that by arrests and executions the ruling
class, under certain conditions, might temporarily retard the development of the
social revolution. But we were convinced that they would not be able to bring it
to a halt. We relied on the fact that the proletariat is the historically rising class,
and that bourgeois society could not develop without increasing the forces of the
proletariat. The bourgeoisie to-day is a falling class. It not only no longer plays
an essential part in production, but by its imperialist methods of appropriation is
destroying the economic structure of the world and human culture generally.
Nevertheless, the historical persistence of the bourgeoisie is colossal. It holds to
power, and does not wish to abandon it. Thereby it threatens to drag after it into
the abyss the whole of society. We are forced to tear it off, to chop it away. The
Red Terror is a weapon utilized against a class, doomed to destruction, which
does not wish to perish. If the White Terror can only retard the historical rise of
the proletariat, the Red Terror hastens the destruction of the bourgeoisie. This
hastening--a pure question of acceleration--is at certain periods of decisive
importance. Without the Red Terror, the Russian bourgeoisie, together with the
world bourgeoisie, would throttle us long before the coming of the revolution in
Europe. One must be blind not to see this, or a swindler to deny it.
The man who recognizes the revolutionary historic importance of the very fact
of the existence of the Soviet system must also sanction the Red Terror.
Kautsky, who, during the last two years, has covered mountains of paper with
polemics against Communism and Terrorism, is obliged, at the end of his
pamphlet, to recognize the facts, and unexpectedly to admit that the Russian
Soviet Government is to-day the most important factor in the world revolution.
"However one regards the Bolshevik methods," he writes, "the fact that a
proletarian government in a large country has not only reached power, but has
retained it for two years up to the present time, amidst great difficulties,
extraordinarily increases the sense of power amongst the proletariat of all
countries. For the actual revolution the Bolsheviks have thereby accomplished a
great work--grosses geleistet." (Page 233.)
This announcement stuns us as a completely unexpected recognition of historical

truth from a quarter whence we had long since ceased to await it. The
Bolsheviks have accomplished a great historical task by existing for two years
against the united capitalist world. But the Bolsheviks held out not only by ideas,
but by the sword. Kautsky's admission is an involuntary sanctioning of the
methods of the Red Terror, and at the same time the most effective
condemnation of his own critical concoction.
THE INFLUENCE OF THE WAR
Kautsky sees one of the reasons for the extremely bloody character of the
revolution in the war and in its hardening influence on manners. Quite
undeniable. That influence, with all the consequences that follow from it, might
have been foreseen earlier--approximately in the period when Kautsky was not
certain whether one ought to vote for the war credits or against them.
"Imperialism has violently torn society out of its condition of unstable

equilibrium," he wrote five years ago in our German book--The War and the
International. "It has blown up the sluices with which Social-Democracy held
back the current of the revolutionary energy of the proletariat, and has directed
that current into its own channels. This monstrous historical experiment, which
at one blow has broken the back of the Socialist International, represents a
deadly danger for bourgeoisie society itself. The hammer has been taken from
the hand of the worker, and has been replaced by the sword. The worker, bound
hand and foot by the mechanism of capitalist society, has suddenly burst out of
its midst, and is learning to put the aims of the community higher than his own
domestic happiness and than life itself.
"With this weapon, which he himself has forged, in his hand, the worker is
placed in a position in which the political destiny of the State depends directly
on him. Those who in former times oppressed and despised him now flatter and
caress him. At the same time he is entering into intimate relations with those
same guns which, according to Lassalle, constitute the most important integral
part of the constitution. He crosses the boundaries of states, participates in
violent requisitions, and under his blows towns pass from hand to hand. Changes
take place such as the last generation did not dream of.
"If the most advanced workers were aware that force was the mother of law,
their political thought still remained saturated with the spirit of opportunism and
self-adaptation to bourgeois legality. To-day the worker has learned in practice
to despise that legality, and violently to destroy it. The static moments in his
psychology are giving place to the dynamic. Heavy guns are knocking into his
head the idea that, in cases where it is impossible to avoid an obstacle, there
remains the possibility of destroying it. Nearly the whole adult male population
is passing through this school of war, terrible in its social realism, which is
bringing forth a new type of humanity.
"Over all the criteria of bourgeois society--its law, its morality, its religion--is
now raised the fist of iron necessity. 'Necessity knows no law' was the
declaration of the German Chancellor (August 4, 1914). Monarchs come out into
the market-place to accuse one another of lying in the language of fishwives;
governments break promises they have solemnly made, while the national
church binds its Lord God like a convict to the national cannon. Is it not obvious
that these circumstances must create important alterations in the psychology of
the working class, radically curing it of that hypnosis of legality which was
created by the period of political stagnation? The propertied classes will soon, to
their sorrow, have to be convinced of this. The proletariat, after passing through
the school of war, at the first serious obstacle within its own country will feel the
necessity of speaking with the language of force. 'Necessity knows no law,' he
will throw in the face of those who attempt to stop him by laws of bourgeois
legality. And the terrible economic necessity which will arise during the course
of this war, and particularly at its end, will drive the masses to spurn very many
laws." (Page 56-57.)
All this is undeniable. But to what is said above one must add that the war has
exercised no less influence on the psychology of the ruling classes. As the
masses become more insistent in their demands, so the bourgeoisie has become
more unyielding.
In times of peace, the capitalists used to guarantee their interests by means of the
"peaceful" robbery of hired labor. During the war they served those same
interests by means of the destruction of countless human lives. This has imparted
to their consciousness as a master class a new "Napoleonic" trait. The capitalists
during the war became accustomed to send to their death millions of
slaves--fellow-countrymen and colonials--for the sake of coal, railway, and other
profits.
During the war there emerged from the ranks of the bourgeoisie--large, middle,
and small--hundreds of thousands of officers, professional fighters, men whose
character has received the hardening of battle, and has become freed from all
external restraints: qualified soldiers, ready and able to defend the privileged
position of the bourgeoisie which produced them with a ferocity which, in its
way, borders on heroism.
The revolution would probably be more humane if the proletariat had the
possibility of "buying off all this band," as Marx once put it. But capitalism
during the war has imposed upon the toilers too great a load of debt, and has too
deeply undermined the foundations of production, for us to be able seriously to
contemplate a ransom in return for which the bourgeoisie would silently make its
peace with the revolution. The masses have lost too much blood, have suffered
too much, have become too savage, to accept a decision which economically
would be beyond their capacity.
To this there must be added other circumstances working in the same direction.
The bourgeoisie of the conquered countries has been embittered by defeat, the
responsibility for which it is inclined to throw on the rank and file--on the
workers and peasants who proved incapable of carrying on "the great national
war" to a victorious conclusion. From this point of view, one finds very
instructive those explanations, unparalleled for their effrontery, which
Ludendorff gave to the Commission of the National Assembly. The bands of
Ludendorff are burning with the desire to take revenge for their humiliation
abroad on the blood of their own proletariat. As for the bourgeoisie of the
victorious countries, it has become inflated with arrogance, and is more than
ever ready to defend its social position with the help of the bestial methods
which guaranteed its victory. We have seen that the bourgeoisie is incapable of
organizing the division of the booty amongst its own ranks without war and
destruction. Can it, without a fight, abandon its booty altogether? The experience
of the last five years leaves no doubt whatsoever on this score: if even previously
it was absolutely utopian to expect that the expropriation of the propertied
classes--thanks to "democracy"--would take place imperceptibly and painlessly,
without insurrections, armed conflicts, attempts at counter-revolution, and severe
repression, the state of affairs we have inherited from the imperialist war
predetermines, doubly and trebly, the tense character of the civil war and the
dictatorship of the proletariat.
THE PARIS COMMUNE AND SOVIET RUSSIA

"The short episode of the first revolution carried out by the proletariat for the
proletariat ended in the triumph of its enemy. This episode--from March 18 to
May 28--lasted seventy-two days."--"The Paris Commune" of March 18, 1871,
P. L. Lavrov, Petrograd. 'Kolos' Publishing House, 1919, pp. 160.
THE IMMATURITY OF THE SOCIALIST PARTIES IN THE COMMUNE.
The Paris Commune of 1871 was the first, as yet weak, historic attempt of the
working class to impose its supremacy. We cherished the memory of the
Commune in spite of the extremely limited character of its experience, the
immaturity of its participants, the confusion of its programme, the lack of unity
amongst its leaders, the indecision of their plans, the hopeless panic of its
executive organs, and the terrifying defeat fatally precipitated by all these. We
cherish in the Commune, in the words of Lavrov, "the first, though still pale,
dawn of the proletarian republic." Quite otherwise with Kautsky. Devoting a
considerable part of his book to a crudely tendencious contrast between the
Commune and the Soviet power, he sees the main advantages of the Commune
in features that we find are its misfortune and its fault.
Kautsky laboriously proves that the Paris Commune of 1871 was not
"artificially" prepared, but emerged unexpectedly, taking the revolutionaries by
surprise--in contrast to the November revolution, which was carefully prepared
by our party. This is incontestable. Not daring clearly to formulate his
profoundly reactionary ideas, Kautsky does not say outright whether the Paris
revolutionaries of 1871 deserve praise for not having foreseen the proletarian
insurrection, and for not having foreseen the inevitable and consciously gone to
meet it. However, all Kautsky's picture was built up in such a way as to produce
in the reader just this idea: the Communards were simply overtaken by
misfortune (the Bavarian philistine, Vollmar, once expressed his regret that the
Communards had not gone to bed instead of taking power into their hands), and,
therefore, deserve pity. The Bolsheviks consciously went to meet misfortune (the
conquest of power), and, therefore, there is no forgiveness for them either in this
or the future world. Such a formulation of the question may seem incredible in
its internal inconsistency. None the less, it follows quite inevitably from the
position of the Kautskian "Independents," who draw their heads into their
shoulders in order to see and foresee nothing; and, if they do move forward, it is
only after having received a preliminary stout blow in the rear.
"To humiliate Paris," writes Kautsky, "not to give it self-government, to deprive

it of its position as capital, to disarm it in order afterwards to attempt with
greater confidence a monarchist coup d'état--such was the most important task
of the National Assembly and the chief of the executive power it elected, Thiers.
Out of this situation arose the conflict which led to the Paris insurrection.
"It is clear how different from this was the character of the coup d'état carried
out by the Bolsheviks, which drew its strength from the yearning for peace;
which had the peasantry behind it; which had in the National Assembly against
it, not monarchists, but S.R.s and Menshevik Social-Democrats.
"The Bolsheviks came to power by means of a well-prepared coup d'état; which

at one blow handed over to them the whole machinery of the State--immediately
utilized in the most energetic and merciless manner for the purpose of
suppressing their opponents, amongst them their proletarian opponents.
"No one, on the other hand, was more surprised by the insurrection of the
Commune than the revolutionaries themselves, and for a considerable number
amongst them the conflict was in the highest degree undesirable." (Page 56.)
In order more clearly to realize the actual sense of what Kautsky has written here
of the Communards, let us bring forward the following evidence.
"On March 1, 1871," writes Lavrov, in his very instructive book on the
Commune, "six months after the fall of the Empire, and a few days before the
explosion of the Commune, the guiding personalities in the Paris International
still had no definite political programme." (Pages 64-65.)
"After March 18," writes the same author, "Paris was in the hands of the
proletariat, but its leaders, overwhelmed by their unexpected power, did not take
the most elementary measures." (Page 71.)
"'Your part is too big for you to play, and your sole aim is to get rid of
responsibility,' said one member of the Central Committee of the National
Guard. In this was a great deal of truth," writes the Communard and historian of
the Commune, Lissagaray. "But at the moment of action itself the absence of
preliminary organization and preparation is very often a reason why parts are
assigned to men which are too big for them to play." (Brussels, 1876; page 106.)
From this one can already see (later on it will become still more obvious) that
the absence of a direct struggle for power on the part of the Paris Socialists was
explained by their theoretical shapelessness and political helplessness, and not at
all by higher considerations of tactics.
We have no doubt that Kautsky's own loyalty to the traditions of the Commune
will be expressed mainly in that extraordinary surprise with which he will greet
the proletarian revolution in Germany as "a conflict in the highest degree
undesirable." We doubt, however, whether this will be ascribed by posterity to
his credit. In reality, one must describe his historical analogy as a combination of
confusion, omission, and fraudulent suggestion.
The intentions which were entertained by Thiers towards Paris were entertained
by Miliukov, who was openly supported by Tseretelli and Chernov, towards
Petrograd. All of them, from Kornilov to Potressov, affirmed day after day that
Petrograd had alienated itself from the country, had nothing in common with it,
was completely corrupted, and was attempting to impose its will upon the
community. To overthrow and humiliate Petrograd was the first task of Miliukov
and his assistants. And this took place at a period when Petrograd was the true
centre of the revolution, which had not yet been able to consolidate its position
in the rest of the country. The former president of the Duma, Rodzianko, openly
talked about handing over Petrograd to the Germans for educative purposes, as
Riga had been handed over. Rodzianko only called by its name what Miliukov
was trying to carry out, and what Kerensky assisted by his whole policy.
Miliukov, like Thiers, wished to disarm the proletariat. More than that, thanks to
Kerensky, Chernov, and Tseretelli, the Petrograd proletariat was to a
considerable extent disarmed in July, 1917. It was partially re-armed during
Kornilov's march on Petrograd in August. And this new arming was a serious
element in the preparation of the November insurrection. In this way, it is just
the points in which Kautsky contrasts our November revolution to the March
revolt of the Paris workers that, to a very large extent, coincide.
In what, however, lies the difference between them? First of all, in the fact that
Thiers' criminal plans succeeded: Paris was throttled by him, and tens of
thousands of workers were destroyed. Miliukov, on the other hand, had a
complete fiasco: Petrograd remained an impregnable fortress of the proletariat,
and the leader of the bourgeoisie went to the Ukraine to petition that the Kaiser's
troops should occupy Russia. For this difference we were to a considerable

extent responsible--and we are ready to bear the responsibility. There is a capital
difference also in the fact--that this told more than once in the further course of
events--that, while the Communards began mainly with considerations of
patriotism, we were invariably guided by the point of view of the international
revolution. The defeat of the Commune led to the practical collapse of the First
International. The victory of the Soviet power has led to the creation of the Third
International.
But Marx--on the eve of the insurrection--advised the Communards not to revolt,
but to create an organization! One might understand Kautsky if he adduced this
evidence in order to show that Marx had insufficiently gauged the acuteness of
the situation in Paris. But Kautsky attempts to exploit Marx's advice as a proof
of his condemnation of insurrection in general. Like all the mandarins of
German Social-Democracy, Kautsky sees in organization first and foremost a
method of hindering revolutionary action.
But limiting ourselves to the question of organization as such, we must not

forget that the November revolution was preceded by nine months of Kerensky's
Government, during which our party, not without success, devoted itself not only
to agitation, but also to organization. The November revolution took place after
we had achieved a crushing majority in the Workers' and Soldiers' Councils of
Petrograd, Moscow, and all the industrial centres in the country, and had
transformed the Soviets into powerful organizations directed by our party. The
Communards did nothing of the kind. Finally, we had behind us the heroic
Commune of Paris, from the defeat of which we had drawn the deduction that
revolutionaries must foresee events and prepare for them. For this also we are to
blame.
Kautsky requires his extensive comparison of the Commune and Soviet Russia
only in order to slander and humiliate a living and victorious dictatorship of the
proletariat in the interests of an attempted dictatorship, in the already fairly
distant past.
Kautsky quotes with extreme satisfaction the statement of the Central Committee
of the National Guard on March 19 in connection with the murder of the two
generals by the soldiery. "We say indignantly: the bloody filth with the help of
which it is hoped to stain our honor is a pitiful slander. We never organized
murder, and never did the National Guard take part in the execution of crime."
Naturally, the Central Committee had no cause to assume responsibility for

murders with which it had no concern. But the sentimental, pathetic tone of the
statement very clearly characterises the political timorousness of these men in
the face of bourgeois public opinion. Nor is this surprising. The representatives
of the National Guard were men in most cases with a very modest revolutionary
past. "Not one well-known name," writes Lissagaray. "They were petty
bourgeois shop-keepers, strangers to all but limited circles, and, in most cases,
strangers hitherto to politics." (Page 70.)
"The modest and, to some extent, fearful sense of terrible historical

responsibility, and the desire to get rid of it as soon as possible," writes Lavrov
of them, "is evident in all the proclamations of this Central Committee, into the
hands of which the destiny of Paris had fallen." (Page 77.)
After bringing forward, to our confusion, the declamation concerning bloodshed,

Kautsky later on follows Marx and Engels in criticizing the indecision of the
Commune. "If the Parisians (i.e., the Communards) had persistently followed up
the tracts of Thiers, they would, perhaps, have managed to seize the government.
The troops falling back from Paris would not have shown the least resistance ...
but they let Thiers go without hindrance. They allowed him to lead away his
troops and reorganize them at Versailles, to inspire a new spirit in, and
strengthen, them." (Page 49.)
Kautsky cannot understand that it was the same men, and for the very same
reasons, who published the statement of March 19 quoted above, who allowed
Thiers to leave Paris with impunity and gather his forces. If the Communards
had conquered with the help of resources of a purely moral character, their
statement would have acquired great weight. But this did not take place. In
reality, their sentimental humaneness was simply the obverse of their
revolutionary passivity. The men who, by the will of fate, had received power in
Paris, could not understand the necessity of immediately utilizing that power to
the end, of hurling themselves after Thiers, and, before he recovered his grasp of
the situation, of crushing him, of concentrating the troops in their hands, of
carrying out the necessary weeding-out of the officer class, of seizing the
provinces. Such men, of course, were not inclined to severe measures with
counter-revolutionary elements. The one was closely bound up with the other.
Thiers could not be followed up without arresting Thiers' agents in Paris and
shooting conspirators and spies. When one considered the execution of
counter-revolutionary generals as an indelible "crime," one could not develop
energy in following up troops who were under the direction of
counter-revolutionary generals.
In the revolution in the highest degree of energy is the highest degree of

humanity. "Just the men," Lavrov justly remarks, "who hold human life and
human blood dear must strive to organize the possibility for a swift and decisive
victory, and then to act with the greatest swiftness and energy, in order to crush
the enemy. For only in this way can we achieve the minimum of inevitable
sacrifice and the minimum of bloodshed." (Page 225.)
The statement of March 19 will, however, be considered with more justice if we

examine it, not as an unconditional confession of faith, but as the expression of
transient moods the day after an unexpected and bloodless victory. Being an
absolute stranger to the understanding of the dynamics of revolution, and the
internal limitations of its swiftly-developing moods, Kautsky thinks in lifeless
schemes, and distorts the perspective of events by arbitrarily selected analogies.
He does not understand that soft-hearted indecision is generally characteristic of
the masses in the first period of the revolution. The workers pursue the offensive
only under the pressure of iron necessity, just as they have recourse to the Red
Terror only under the threat of destruction by the White Guards. That which
Kautsky represents as the result of the peculiarly elevated moral feeling of the
Parisian proletariat in 1871 is, in reality, merely a characteristic of the first stage
of the civil war. A similar phenomenon could have been witnessed in our case.
In Petrograd we conquered power in November, 1917, almost without

bloodshed, and even without arrests. The ministers of Kerensky's Government
were set free very soon after the revolution. More, the Cossack General,
Krasnov, who had advanced on Petrograd together with Kerensky after the
power had passed to the Soviet, and who had been made prisoner by us at
Gatchina, was set free on his word of honor the next day. This was "generosity"
quite in the spirit of the first measures of the Commune. But it was a mistake.
Afterwards, General Krasnov, after fighting against us for about a year in the
South, and destroying many thousands of Communists, again advanced on
Petrograd, this time in the ranks of Yudenich's army. The proletarian revolution
assumed a more severe character only after the rising of the junkers in Petrograd,
and particularly after the rising of the Czecho-Slovaks on the Volga organized
by the Cadets, the S.R.s, and the Mensheviks, after their mass executions of
Communists, the attempt on Lenin's life, the murder of Uritsky, etc., etc.
The same tendencies, only in an embryonic form, we see in the history of the
Commune.
Driven by the logic of the struggle, it took its stand in principle on the path of
intimidation. The creation of the Committee of Public Safety was dictated, in the
case of many of its supporters, by the idea of the Red Terror. The Committee
was appointed "to cut off the heads of traitors" (Journal Officiel No. 123), "to
avenge treachery" (No. 124). Under the head of "intimidatory" decrees we must
class the order to seize the property of Thiers and of his ministers, to destroy
Thiers' house, to destroy the Vendome column, and especially the decree on
hostages. For every captured Communard or sympathizer with the Commune
shot by the Versaillese, three hostages were to be shot. The activity of the
Prefecture of Paris controlled by Raoul Rigault had a purely terroristic, though
not always a useful, purpose.
The effect of all these measures of intimidation was paralyzed by the helpless
opportunism of the guiding elements in the Commune, by their striving to
reconcile the bourgeoisie with the fait accompli by the help of pitiful phrases, by
their vacillations between the fiction of democracy and the reality of
dictatorship. The late Lavrov expresses the latter idea splendidly in his book on
the Commune.
"The Paris of the rich bourgeois and the poor proletarians, as a political
community of different classes, demanded, in the name of liberal principles,
complete freedom of speech, of assembly, of criticism of the government, etc.
The Paris which had accomplished the revolution in the interests of the
proletariat, and had before it the task of realizing this revolution in the shape of
institutions, Paris, as the community of the emancipated working-class
proletariat, demanded revolutionary--i.e., dictatorial, measures against the
enemies of the new order." (Pages 143-144.)
If the Paris Commune had not fallen, but had continued to exist in the midst of a
ceaseless struggle, there can be no doubt that it would have been obliged to have
recourse to more and more severe measures for the suppression of the
counter-revolution. True, Kautsky would not then have had the possibility of
contrasting the humane Communards with the inhumane Bolsheviks. But in
return, probably, Thiers, would not have had the possibility of inflicting his
monstrous bloodletting upon the proletariat of Paris. History, possibly, would
not have been the loser.
THE IRRESPONSIBLE CENTRAL COMMITTEE AND THE

"DEMOCRATIC" COMMUNE
"On March 19," Kautsky informs us, "in the Central Committee of the National
Guard, some demanded a march on Versailles, others an appeal to the electors,
and a third party the adoption first of all of revolutionary measures; as if every
one of these steps," he proceeds very learnedly to inform us, "were not equally
necessary, and as if one excluded the other." (Page 72.) Further on, Kautsky, in
connection with these disputes in the Commune, presents us with various
warmed-up platitudes as to the mutual relations of reform and revolution. In
reality, the following was the situation. If it were decided to march on Versailles,
and to do this without losing an hour it was necessary immediately to reorganize
the National Guard, to place at its head the best fighting elements of the Paris
proletariat, and thereby temporarily to weaken Paris from the revolutionary point
of view. But to organize elections in Paris, while at the same time sending out of
its walls the flower of the working class, would have been senseless from the
point of view of the revolutionary party. Theoretically, a march on Versailles
and elections to the Commune, of course, did not exclude each other in the
slightest degree, but in practice they did exclude each other: for the success of
the elections, it was necessary to postpone the attack; for the attack to succeed,
the elections must be put off. Finally, leading the proletariat out to the field and
thereby temporarily weakening Paris, it was essential to obtain some guarantee
against the possibility of counter-revolutionary attempts in the capital; for Thiers
would not have hesitated at any measures to raise a white revolt in the rear of the
Communards. It was essential to establish a more military--i.e., a more stringent
regime in the capital. "They had to fight," writes Lavrov, "against many internal
foes with whom Paris was full, who only yesterday had been rioting around the
Exchange and the Vendome Square, who had their representatives in the
administration and in the National Guard, who possessed their press, and their
meetings, who almost openly maintained contact with the Versaillese, and who
became more determined and more audacious at every piece of carelessness, at
every check of the Commune." (Page 87.)
It was necessary, side by side with this, to carry out revolutionary measures of a
financial and generally of an economic character: first and foremost, for the
equipment of the revolutionary army. All these most necessary measures of
revolutionary dictatorship could with difficulty be reconciled with an extensive
electoral campaign. But Kautsky has not the least idea of what a revolution is in
practice. He thinks that theoretically to reconcile is the same as practically to
accomplish.
The Central Committee appointed March 22 as the day of elections for the
Commune; but, not sure of itself, frightened at its own illegality, striving to act
in unison with more "legal" institutions, entered into ridiculous and endless
negotiations with a quite helpless assembly of mayors and deputies of Paris,
showing its readiness to divide power with them if only an agreement could be
arrived at. Meanwhile precious time was slipping by.
Marx, on whom Kautsky, through old habit, tries to rely, did not under any
circumstances propose that, at one and the same time, the Commune should be
elected and the workers should be led out into the field for the war. In his letter
to Kugelmann, Marx wrote, on April 12, 1871, that the Central Committee of the
National Guard had too soon given up its power in favor of the Commune.
Kautsky, in his own words, "does not understand" this opinion of Marx. It is
quite simple. Marx at any rate understood that the problem was not one of
chasing legality, but of inflicting a fatal blow upon the enemy. "If the Central
Committee had consisted of real revolutionaries," says Lavrov, and rightly, "it
ought to have acted differently. It would have been quite unforgivable for it to
have given the enemy ten days' respite before the election and assembly of the
Commune, while the leaders of the proletariat refused to carry out their duty and
did not recognize that they had the right immediately to lead the proletariat. As it
was, the feeble immaturity of the popular parties created a Committee which
considered those ten days of inaction incumbent upon it." (Page 78.)
The yearning of the Central Committee to hand over power as soon as possible
to a "legal" Government was dictated, not so much by the superstitions of former
democracy, of which, by the way, there was no lack, as by fear of responsibility.
Under the plea that it was a temporary institution, the Central Committee
avoided the taking of the most necessary and absolutely pressing measures, in
spite of the fact that all the material apparatus of power was centred in its hands.
But the Commune itself did not take over political power in full from the Central
Committee, and the latter continued to interfere in all business quite

unceremoniously. This created a dual Government, which was extremely
dangerous, particularly under military conditions.
On May 3 the Central Committee sent deputies to the Commune demanding that
the Ministry for War should be placed under its control. Again there arose, as
Lissagaray writes, the question as to whether "the Central Committee should be
dissolved, or arrested, or entrusted with the administration of the Ministry for
War."
Here was a question, not of the principles of democracy, but of the absence, in
the case of both parties, of a clear programme of action, and of the readiness,
both of the irresponsible revolutionary organizations in the shape of the Central
Committee and of the "democratic" organization of the Commune, to shift the
responsibility on to the other's shoulders, while at the same time not entirely
renouncing power.
These were political relations which it might seem no one could call worthy of
imitation.
"But the Central Committee," Kautsky consoles himself, "never attempted to

infringe the principle in virtue of which the supreme power must belong to the
delegates elected by universal suffrage." In this respect the "Paris Commune was
the direct antithesis of the Soviet Republic." (Page 74.) There was no unity of
government, there was no revolutionary decision, there existed a division of
power, and, as a result, there came swift and terrible destruction. But to
counter-balance this--is it not comforting?--there was no infringement of the
"principle" of democracy.
THE DEMOCRATIC COMMUNE AND THE REVOLUTIONARY

DICTATORSHIP
Comrade Lenin has already pointed out to Kautsky that attempts to depict the
Commune as the expression of formal democracy constitute a piece of absolute
theoretical swindling. The Commune, in its tradition and in the conception of its
leading political party--the Blanquists--was the expression of the dictatorship of
the revolutionary city over the country. So it was in the great French Revolution;
so it would have been in the revolution of 1871 if the Commune had not fallen in
the first days. The fact that in Paris itself a Government was elected on the basis
of universal suffrage does not exclude a much more significant fact--namely,
that of the military operations carried on by the Commune, one city, against
peasant France, that is the whole country. To satisfy the great democrat,
Kautsky, the revolutionaries of the Commune ought, as a preliminary, to have
consulted, by means of universal suffrage, the whole population of France as to
whether it permitted them to carry on a war with Thiers' bands.
Finally, in Paris itself the elections took place after the bourgeoisie, or at least its
most active elements, had fled, and after Thiers' troops had been evacuated. The
bourgeoisie that remained in Paris, in spite of all its impudence, was still afraid
of the revolutionary battalions, and the elections took place under the auspices of
that fear, which was the forerunner of what in the future would have been
inevitable--namely, of the Red Terror. But to console oneself with the thought
that the Central Committee of the National Guard, under the dictatorship of
which--unfortunately a very feeble and formalist dictatorship--the elections to
the Commune were held, did not infringe the principle of universal suffrage, is
truly to brush with the shadow of a broom.
Amusing himself by barren analogies, Kautsky benefits by the circumstance that

his reader is not acquainted with the facts. In Petrograd, in November, 1917, we
also elected a Commune (Town Council) on the basis of the most "democratic"
voting, without limitations for the bourgeoisie. These elections, being boycotted
by the bourgeoisie parties, gave us a crushing majority. The "democratically"
elected Council voluntarily submitted to the Petrograd Soviet--i.e., placed the
fact of the dictatorship of the proletariat higher than the "principle" of universal
suffrage, and, after a short time, dissolved itself altogether by its own act, in
favor of one of the sections of the Petrograd Soviet. Thus the Petrograd
Soviet--that true father of the Soviet regime--has upon itself the seal of a formal
"democratic" benediction in no way less than the Paris Commune.[6]
[6] It is not without interest to observe that in the Communal elections of 1871 in
Paris there participated 230,000 electors. At the Town elections of November,
1917, in Petrograd, in spite of the boycott of the election on the part of all parties
except ourselves and the Left Social Revolutionaries, who had no influence in
the capital, there participated 390,000 electors. In Paris, in 1871, the population
numbered two millions. In Petrograd, in November, 1917, there were not more
than two millions. It must be noticed that our electoral system was infinitely
more democratic. The Central Committee of the National Guard carried out the
elections on the basis of the electoral law of the empire.
"At the elections of March 26, eighty members were elected to the Commune.
Of these, fifteen were members of the government party (Thiers), and six were
bourgeois radicals who were in opposition to the Government, but condemned
the rising (of the Paris workers).
"The Soviet Republic," Kautsky teaches us, "would never have allowed such
counter-revolutionary elements to stand as candidates, let alone be elected. The
Commune, on the other hand, out of respect for democracy, did not place the
least obstacle in the way of the election of its bourgeois opponents." (Page 74.)
We have already seen above that here Kautsky completely misses the mark. First
of all, at a similar stage of development of the Russian Revolution, there did not
take place democratic elections to the Petrograd Commune, in which the Soviet
Government placed no obstacle in the way of the bourgeois parties; and if the
Cadets, the S.R.s and the Mensheviks, who had their press which was openly
calling for the overthrow of the Soviet Government, boycotted the elections, it
was only because at that time they still hoped soon to make an end of us with the
help of armed force. Secondly, no democracy expressing all classes was actually
to be found in the Paris Commune. The bourgeois deputies--Conservatives,
Liberals, Gambettists--found no place in it.
"Nearly all these individuals," says Lavrov, "either immediately or very soon,
left the Council of the Commune. They might have been representatives of Paris
as a free city under the rule of the bourgeoisie, but were quite out of place in the
Council of the Commune, which, willy-nilly, consistently or inconsistently,
completely or incompletely, did represent the revolution of the proletariat, and
an attempt, feeble though it might be, of building up forms of society
corresponding to that revolution." (Pages 111-112.) If the Petrograd bourgeoisie
had not boycotted the municipal elections, its representatives would have entered
the Petrograd Council. They would have remained there up to the first Social
Revolutionary and Cadet rising, after which--with the permission or without the
permission of Kautsky--they would probably have been arrested if they did not
leave the Council in good time, as at a certain moment did the bourgeois
members of the Paris Commune. The course of events would have remained the
same: only on their surface would certain episodes have worked out differently.
In supporting the democracy of the Commune, and at the same time accusing it
of an insufficiently decisive note in its attitude to Versailles, Kautsky does not
understand that the Communal elections, carried out with the ambiguous help of
the "lawful" mayors and deputies, reflected the hope of a peaceful agreement
with Versailles. This is the whole point. The leaders were anxious for a
compromise, not for a struggle. The masses had not yet outlived their illusions.
Undeserved revolutionary reputations had not yet had time to be exposed.
Everything taken together was called democracy.
"We must rise above our enemies by moral force...." preached Vermorel. "We
must not infringe liberty and individual life...." Striving to avoid fratricidal war,
Vermorel called upon the liberal bourgeoisie, whom hitherto he had so
mercilessly exposed, to set up "a lawful Government, recognized and respected
by the whole population of Paris." The Journal Officiel, published under the
editorship of the Internationalist Longuet, wrote: "The sad misunderstanding,
which in the June days (1848) armed two classes of society against each other,
cannot be renewed.... Class antagonism has ceased to exist...." (March 30.) And,
further: "Now all conflicts will be appeased, because all are inspired with a
feeling of solidarity, because never yet was there so little social hatred and social
antagonism." (April 3.)
At the session of the Commune of April 25, Jourdé, and not without foundation,
congratulated himself on the fact that the Commune had "never yet infringed the
principle of private property." By this means they hoped to win over bourgeois
public opinion and find the path to compromise.
"Such a doctrine," says Lavrov, and rightly, "did not in the least disarm the
enemies of the proletariat, who understood excellently with what its success
threatened them, and only sapped the proletarian energy and, as it were,
deliberately blinded it in the face of its irreconcilable enemies." (Page 137.) But
this enfeebling doctrine was inextricably bound up with the fiction of
democracy. The form of mock legality it was that allowed them to think that the
problem would be solved without a struggle. "As far as the mass of the
population is concerned," writes Arthur Arnould, a member of the Commune, "it
was to a certain extent justified in the belief in the existence of, at the very least,
a hidden agreement with the Government." Unable to attract the bourgeoisie, the
compromisers, as always, deceived the proletariat.
The clearest evidence of all that, in the conditions of the inevitable and already
beginning civil war, democratic parliamentarism expressed only the
compromising helplessness of the leading groups, was the senseless procedure of
the supplementary elections to the Commune of April 6. At this moment, "it was
no longer a question of voting," writes Arthur Arnould. "The situation had
become so tragic that there was not either the time or the calmness necessary for
the correct functioning of the elections.... All persons devoted to the Commune
were on the fortifications, in the forts, in the foremost detachments.... The people
attributed no importance whatever to these supplementary elections. The
elections were in reality merely parliamentarism. What was required was not to
count voters, but to have soldiers: not to discover whether we had lost or gained
in the Commune of Paris, but to defend Paris from the Versaillese." From these
words Kautsky might have observed why in practice it is not so simple to
combine class war with interclass democracy.
"The Commune is not a Constituent Assembly," wrote in his book, Millière, one
of the best brains of the Commune. "It is a military Council. It must have one
aim, victory; one weapon, force; one law, the law of social salvation."
"They could never understand," Lissagaray accuses the leaders, "that the
Commune was a barricade, and not an administration."
They began to understand it in the end, when it was too late. Kautsky has not
understood it to this day. There is no reason to believe that he will ever
understand it.
*****
The Commune was the living negation of formal democracy, for in its
development it signified the dictatorship of working class Paris over the peasant
country. It is this fact that dominates all the rest. However much the political
doctrinaires, in the midst of the Commune itself, clung to the appearances of
democratic legality, every action of the Commune, though insufficient for
victory, was sufficient to reveal its illegal nature.
The Commune--that is to say, the Paris City Council--repealed the national law
concerning conscription. It called its official organ The Official Journal of the
French Republic. Though cautiously, it still laid hands on the State Bank. It
proclaimed the separation of Church and State, and abolished the Church
Budgets. It entered into relations with various embassies. And so on, and so on.
It did all this in virtue of the revolutionary dictatorship. But Clemenceau, young
democrat as he was then, would not recognize that virtue.
At a conference with the Central Committee, Clemenceau said: "The rising had
an unlawful beginning.... Soon the Committee will become ridiculous, and its
decrees will be despised. Besides, Paris has not the right to rise against France,
and must unconditionally accept the authority of the Assembly."
The problem of the Commune was to dissolve the National Assembly.

Unfortunately it did not succeed in doing so. To-day Kautsky seeks to discover
for its criminal intentions some mitigating circumstances.
He points out that the Communards had as their opponents in the National
Assembly the monarchists, while we in the Constituent Assembly had against us
... Socialists, in the persons of the S.R.s, and the Mensheviks. A complete mental
eclipse! Kautsky talks about the Mensheviks and the S.R.s, but forgets our sole
serious foe--the Cadets. It was they who represented our Russian Thiers
party--i.e., a bloc of property owners in the name of property: and Professor
Miliukov did his utmost to imitate the "little great man." Very soon indeed--long
before the October Revolution--Miliukov began to seek his Gallifet in the
generals Kornilov, Alexeiev, then Kaledin, Krasnov, in turn. And after Kolchak
had thrown aside all political parties, and had dissolved the Constituent
Assembly, the Cadet Party, the sole serious bourgeois party, in its essence
monarchist through and through, not only did not refuse to support him, but on
the contrary devoted more sympathy to him than before.
The Mensheviks and the S.R.s played no independent role amongst us--just like
Kautsky's party during the revolutionary events in Germany. They based their
whole policy upon a coalition with the Cadets, and thereby put the Cadets in a
position to dictate quite irrespective of the balance of political forces. The
Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik Parties were only an intermediary
apparatus for the purpose of collecting, at meetings and elections, the political
confidence of the masses awakened by the revolution, and for handing it over for
disposal by the counter-revolutionary imperialist party of the
Cadets--independently of the issue of the elections.
The purely vassal-like dependence of the S.R.s and Menshevik majority on the
Cadet minority itself represented a very thinly-veiled insult to the idea of
"democracy." But this is not all.
In all districts of the country where the regime of "democracy" lived too long, it
inevitably ended in an open coup d'etat of the counter-revolution. So it was in
the Ukraine, where the democratic Rada, having sold the Soviet Government to
German imperialism, found itself overthrown by the monarchist Skoropadsky.
So it was in the Kuban, where the democratic Rada found itself under the heel of
Denikin. So it was--and this was the most important experiment of our
"democracy"--in Siberia, where the Constituent Assembly, with the formal
supremacy of the S.R.s and the Mensheviks, in the absence of the Bolsheviks,
and the de facto guidance of the Cadets, led in the end to the dictatorship of the
Tsarist Admiral Kolchak. So it was, finally, in the north, where the Constituent
Assembly government of the Socialist-Revolutionary Chaikovsky became
merely a tinsel decoration for the rule of counter-revolutionary generals, Russian
and British. So it was, or is, in all the small Border States--in Finland, Esthonia,
Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Georgia, Armenia--where, under the formal banner of
"democracy," there is being consolidated the supremacy of the landlords, the
capitalists, and the foreign militarists.
THE PARIS WORKER OF 1871 AND THE PETROGRAD PROLETARIAN

OF 1917
One of the most coarse, unfounded, and politically disgraceful comparisons

which Kautsky makes between the Commune and Soviet Russia is touching the
character of the Paris worker in 1871 and the Russian proletarian of 1917-19.
The first Kautsky depicts as a revolutionary enthusiast capable of a high measure
of self-sacrifice; the second, as an egoist and a coward, an irresponsible
anarchist.
The Parisian worker has behind him too definite a past to need revolutionary
recommendations--or protection from the praises of the present Kautsky. None
the less, the Petrograd proletarian has not, and cannot have, any reason for
avoiding a comparison with his heroic elder brother. The continuous three years'
struggle of the Petrograd workers--first for the conquest of power, and then for
its maintenance and consolidation--represents an exceptional story of collective
heroism and self-sacrifice, amidst unprecedented tortures in the shape of hunger,
cold, and constant perils.
Kautsky, as we can discover in another connection, takes for contrast with the
flower of the Communards the most sinister elements of the Russian proletariat.
In this respect also he is in no way different from the bourgeois sycophants, to
whom dead Communards always appear infinitely more attractive than the
living.
The Petrograd proletariat seized power four and a half decades after the Parisian.
This period has told enormously in our favor. The petty bourgeois craft character
of old and partly of new Paris is quite foreign to Petrograd, the centre of the
most concentrated industry in the world. The latter circumstances has extremely
facilitated our tasks of agitation and organization, as well as the setting up of the
Soviet system.
Our proletariat did not have even a faint measure of the rich revolutionary
traditions of the French proletariat. But, instead, there was still very fresh in the
memory of the older generation of our workers, at the beginning of the present
revolution, the great experiment of 1905, its failure, and the duty of vengeance it
had handed down.
The Russian workers had not, like the French, passed through a long school of
democracy and parliamentarism, which at a certain epoch represented an
important factor in the political education of the proletariat. But, on the other
hand, the Russian working class had not had seared into its soul the bitterness of
dissolution and the poison of scepticism, which up to a certain, and--let us
hope--not very distant moment, still restrain the revolutionary will of the French
proletariat.
The Paris Commune suffered a military defeat before economic problems had
arisen before it in their full magnitude. In spite of the splendid fighting qualities
of the Paris workers, the military fate of the Commune was at once determined
as hopeless. Indecision and compromise-mongering above brought about
collapse below.
The pay of the National Guard was issued on the basis of the existence of
162,000 rank and file and 6,500 officers; the number of those who actually went
into battle, especially after the unsuccessful sortie of April 3, varied between
twenty and thirty thousand.
These facts do not in the least compromise the Paris workers, and do not give us
the right to consider them cowards and deserters--although, of course, there was
no lack of desertion. For a fighting army there must be, first of all, a centralized
and accurate apparatus of administration. Of this the Commune had not even a
trace.
The War Department of the Commune, was, in the expression of one writer, as it
were a dark room, in which all collided. The office of the Ministry was filled
with officers and ordinary Guards, who demanded military supplies and food,
and complained that they were not relieved. They were sent to the garrison....
"One battalion remained in the trenches for 20 and 30 days, while others were
constantly in reserve.... This carelessness soon killed any discipline. Courageous
men soon determined to rely only on themselves; others avoided service. In the
same way did officers behave. One would leave his post to go to the help of a
neighbor who was under fire; others went away to the city...." (Lavrov, page
100.)
Such a regime could not remain unpunished; the Commune was drowned in
blood. But in this connection Kautsky has a marvelous solution.
"The waging of war," he says, sagely shaking his head, "is, after all, not a strong
side of the proletariat." (Page 76.)
This aphorism, worthy of Pangloss, is fully on a level with the other great
remark of Kautsky, namely, that the International is not a suitable weapon to use
in wartime, being in its essence an "instrument of peace."
In these two aphorisms, in reality, may be found the present Kautsky, complete,
in his entirety--i.e., just a little over a round zero.
The waging of war, do you see, is on the whole, not a strong side of the
proletariat, the more that the International itself was not created for wartime.
Kautsky's ship was built for lakes and quiet harbors, not at all for the open sea,
and not for a period of storms. If that ship has sprung a leak, and has begun to
fill, and is now comfortably going to the bottom, we must throw all the blame
upon the storm, the unnecessary mass of water, the extraordinary size of the
waves, and a series of other unforeseen circumstances for which Kautsky did not
build his marvelous instrument.
The international proletariat put before itself as its problem the conquest of
power. Independently of whether civil war, "generally," belongs to the inevitable
attributes of revolution, "generally," this fact remains unquestioned--that the
advance of the proletariat, at any rate in Russia, Germany, and parts of former
Austro-Hungary, took the form of an intense civil war not only on internal but
also on external fronts. If the waging of war is not the strong side of the
proletariat, while the workers' International is suited only for peaceful epochs,
then we may as well erect a cross over the revolution and over Socialism; for the
waging of war is a fairly strong side of the capitalist State, which without a war
will not admit the workers to supremacy. In that case there remains only to
proclaim the so-called "Socialist" democracy to be merely the accompanying
feature of capitalist society and bourgeois parliamentarism--i.e., openly to
sanction what the Eberts, Schneidermanns, Renaudels, carry out in practice and
what Kautsky still, it seems, protests against in words.
The waging of war was not a strong side of the Commune. Quite so; that was
why it was crushed. And how mercilessly crushed!
"We have to recall the proscriptions of Sulla, Antony, and Octavius," wrote in
his time the very moderate liberal, Fiaux, "to meet such massacres in the history
of civilized nations. The religious wars under the last Valois, the night of St.
Bartholomew, the Reign of Terror were, in comparison with it, child's play. In
the last week of May alone, in Paris, 17,000 corpses of the insurgent Federals
were picked up ... the killing was still going on about June 15."
"The waging of war, after all, is not the strong side of the proletariat."
It is not true! The Russian workers have shown that they are capable of wielding
the "instrument of war" as well. We see here a gigantic step forward in
comparison with the Commune. It is not a renunciation of the Commune--for the
traditions of the Commune consist not at all in its helplessness--but the
continuation of its work. The Commune was weak. To complete its work we
have become strong. The Commune was crushed. We are inflicting blow after
blow upon the executioners of the Commune. We are taking vengeance for the
Commune, and we shall avenge it.
*****
Out of 167,000 National Guards who received pay, only twenty or thirty
thousand went into battle. These figures serve as interesting material for
conclusions as to the role of formal democracy in a revolutionary epoch. The
vote of the Paris Commune was decided, not at the elections, but in the battles
with the troops of Thiers. One hundred and sixty-seven thousand National
Guards represented the great mass of the electorate. But in reality, in the battles,
the fate of the Commune was decided by twenty or thirty thousand persons; the
most devoted fighting minority. This minority did not stand alone: it simply
expressed, in a more courageous and self-sacrificing manner, the will of the
majority. But none the less it was a minority. The others who hid at the critical
moment were not hostile to the Commune; on the contrary, they actively or
passively supported it, but they were less politically conscious, less decisive. On
the arena of political democracy, their lower level of political consciousness
afforded the possibility of their being deceived by adventurers, swindlers,
middle-class cheats, and honest dullards who really deceived themselves. But, at
the moment of open class war, they, to a greater or lesser degree, followed the
self-sacrificing minority. It was this that found its expression in the organization
of the National Guard. If the existence of the Commune had been prolonged, this
relationship between the advance guard and the mass of the proletariat would
have grown more and more firm.
The organization which would have been formed and consolidated in the process
of the open struggle, as the organization of the laboring masses, would have
become the organization of their dictatorship--the Council of Deputies of the
armed proletariat.
MARX AND ... KAUTSKY.
Kautsky loftily sweeps aside Marx's views on terror, expressed by him in the
Neue Rheinische Zeitung--as at that time, do you see, Marx was still very
"young," and consequently his views had not yet had time to arrive at that
condition of complete enfeeblement which is so clearly to be observed in the
case of certain theoreticians in the seventh decade of their life. As a contrast to

the green Marx of 1848-49 (the author of the Communist Manifesto!) Kautsky
quotes the mature Marx of the epoch of the Paris Commune--and the latter,
under the pen of Kautsky, loses his great lion's mane, and appears before us as
an extremely respectable reasoner, bowing before the holy places of democracy,
declaiming on the sacredness of human life, and filled with all due reverence for
the political charms of Schneidermann, Vandervelde, and particularly of his own
physical grandson, Jean Longuet. In a word, Marx, instructed by the experience
of life, proves to be a well-behaved Kautskian.
From the deathless Civil War in France, the pages of which have been filled
with a new and intense life in our own epoch, Kautsky has quoted only those
lines in which the mighty theoretician of the social revolution contrasted the
generosity of the Communards with the bourgeois ferocity of the Versaillese.
Kautsky has devastated these lines and made them commonplace. Marx, as the
preacher of detached humanity, as the apostle of general love of mankind! Just
as if we were talking about Buddha or Leo Tolstoy.... It is more than natural that,
against the international campaign which represented the Communards as
souteneurs and the women of the Commune as prostitutes, against the vile
slanders which attributed to the conquered fighters ferocious features drawn
from the degenerate imagination of the victorious bourgeoisie, Marx should
emphasize and underline those features of tenderness and nobility which not
infrequently were merely the reverse side of indecision. Marx was Marx. He was
neither an empty pedant, nor, all the more, the legal defender of the revolution:
he combined a scientific analysis of the Commune with its revolutionary
apology. He not only explained and criticised--he defended and struggled. But,
emphasizing the mildness of the Commune which failed, Marx left no doubt
possible concerning the measures which the Commune ought to have taken in
order not to fail.
The author of the Civil War accuses the Central Committee--i.e., the then
Council of National Guards' Deputies, of having too soon given up its place to
the elective Commune. Kautsky "does not understand" the reason for such a
reproach. This conscientious non-understanding is one of the symptoms of
Kautsky's mental decline in connection with questions of the revolution
generally. The first place, according to Marx, ought to have been filled by a
purely fighting organ, a centre of the insurrection and of military operations
against Versailles, and not the organized self-government of the labor
democracy. For the latter the turn would come later.
Marx accuses the Commune of not having at once begun an attack against the
Versailles, and of having entered upon the defensive, which always appears
"more humane," and gives more possibilities of appealing to moral law and the
sacredness of human life, but in conditions of civil war never leads to victory.
Marx, on the other hand, first and foremost wanted a revolutionary victory.
Nowhere, by one word, does he put forward the principle of democracy as
something standing above the class struggle. On the contrary, with the
concentrated contempt of the revolutionary and the Communist, Marx--not the
young editor of the Rhine Paper, but the mature author of Capital: our genuine
Marx with the mighty leonine mane, not as yet fallen under the hands of the
hairdressers of the Kautsky school--with what concentrated contempt he speaks
about the "artificial atmosphere of parliamentarism" in which physical and
spiritual dwarfs like Thiers seem giants! The Civil War, after the barren and
pedantic pamphlet of Kautsky, acts like a storm that clears the air.
In spite of Kautsky's slanders, Marx had nothing in common with the view of
democracy as the last, absolute, supreme product of history. The development of
bourgeois society itself, out of which contemporary democracy grew up, in no
way represents that process of gradual democratization which figured before the
war in the dreams of the greatest Socialist illusionist of democracy--Jean
Jaurès--and now in those of the most learned of pedants, Karl Kautsky. In the
empire of Napoleon III, Marx sees "the only possible form of government in the
epoch in which the bourgeoisie has already lost the possibility of governing the
people, while the working class has not yet acquired it." In this way, not
democracy, but Bonapartism, appears in Marx's eyes as the final form of
bourgeois power. Learned men may say that Marx was mistaken, as the
Bonapartist empire gave way for half a century to the "Democratic Republic."
But Marx was not mistaken. In essence he was right. The Third Republic has
been the period of the complete decay of democracy. Bonapartism has found in
the Stock Exchange Republic of Poincaré-Clémenceau, a more finished
expression than in the Second Empire. True, the Third Republic was not
crowned by the imperial diadem; but in return there loomed over it the shadow
of the Russian Tsar.
In his estimate of the Commune, Marx carefully avoids using the worn currency
of democratic terminology. "The Commune was," he writes, "not a parliament,
but a working institution, and united in itself both executive and legislative
power." In the first place, Marx puts forward, not the particular democratic form
of the Commune, but its class essence. The Commune, as is known, abolished
the regular army and the police, and decreed the confiscation of Church
property. It did this in the right of the revolutionary dictatorship of Paris, without
the permission of the general democracy of the State, which at that moment
formally had found a much more "lawful" expression in the National Assembly
of Thiers. But a revolution is not decided by votes. "The National Assembly,"
says Marx, "was nothing more nor less than one of the episodes of that
revolution, the true embodiment of which was, nevertheless, armed Paris." How
far this is from formal democracy!
"It only required that the Communal order of things," says Marx, "should be set
up in Paris and in the secondary centres, and the old central government would
in the provinces also have yielded to the self-government of the producers."
Marx, consequently, sees the problem of revolutionary Paris, not in appealing
from its victory to the frail will of the Constituent Assembly, but in covering the
whole of France with a centralized organization of Communes, built up not on
the external principles of democracy but on the genuine self-government of the
producers.
Kautsky has cited as an argument against the Soviet Constitution the indirectness
of elections, which contradicts the fixed laws of bourgeois democracy. Marx
characterizes the proposed structure of labor France in the following
words:--"The management of the general affairs of the village communes of
every district was to devolve on the Assembly of plenipotentiary delegates
meeting in the chief town of the district; while the district assemblies were in
turn to send delegates to the National Assembly sitting in Paris."
Marx, as we can see, was not in the least degree disturbed by the many degrees
of indirect election, in so far as it was a question of the State organization of the
proletariat itself. In the framework of bourgeois democracy, indirectness of
election confuses the demarcation line of parties and classes; but in the
"self-government of the producers"--i.e., in the class proletarian State,
indirectness of election is a question not of politics, but of the technical
requirements of self-government, and within certain limits may present the same
advantages as in the realm of trade union organization.
The Philistines of democracy are indignant at the inequality in representation of

the workers and peasants which, in the Soviet Constitution, reflects the
difference in the revolutionary roles of the town and the country. Marx writes:
"The Commune desired to bring the rural producers under the intellectual
leadership of the central towns of their districts, and there to secure to them, in
the workmen of the towns, the natural guardians of their interests." The question
was not one of making the peasant equal to the worker on paper, but of
spiritually raising the peasant to the level of the worker. All questions of the
proletarian State Marx decides according to the revolutionary dynamics of living
forces, and not according to the play of shadows upon the market-place screen of
parliamentarism.
In order to reach the last confines of mental collapse, Kautsky denies the
universal authority of the Workers' Councils on the ground that there is no legal
boundary between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. In the indeterminate
nature of the social divisions Kautsky sees the source of the arbitrary authority
of the Soviet dictatorship. Marx sees directly the contrary. "The Commune was
an extremely elastic form of the State, while all former forms of government had
suffered from narrowness. Its secret consists in this, that in its very essence it
was the government of the working class, the result of the struggle between the
class of producers and the class of appropriators, the political form, long sought,
under which there could be accomplished the economic emancipation of labor."
The secret of the Commune consisted in the fact that by its very essence it was a
government of the working class. This secret, explained by Marx, has remained,
for Kautsky, even to this day, a mystery sealed with seven seals.
The Pharisees of democracy speak with indignation of the repressive measures

of the Soviet Government, of the closing of newspapers, of arrests and shooting.
Marx replies to "the vile abuse of the lackeys of the Press" and to the reproaches
of the "well-intentioned bourgeois doctrinaries," in connection with the
repressive measures of the Commune in the following words:--"Not satisfied
with their open waging of a most bloodthirsty war against Paris, the Versaillese
strove secretly to gain an entry by corruption and conspiracy. Could the
Commune at such a time without shamefully betraying its trust, have observed
the customary forms of liberalism, just as if profound peace reigned around it?
Had the government of the Commune been akin in spirit to that of Thiers, there
would have been no more occasion to suppress newspapers of the party of order
in Paris than there was to suppress newspapers of the Commune at Versailles."
In this way, what Kautsky demands in the name of the sacred foundations of
democracy Marx brands as a shameful betrayal of trust.
Concerning the destruction of which the Commune is accused, and of which

now the Soviet Government is accused, Marx speaks as of "an inevitable and
comparatively insignificant episode in the titanic struggle of the new-born order
with the old in its collapse." Destruction and cruelty are inevitable in any war.
Only sycophants can consider them a crime "in the war of the slaves against
their oppressors, the only just war in history." (Marx.) Yet our dread accuser
Kautsky, in his whole book, does not breathe a word of the fact that we are in a
condition of perpetual revolutionary self-defence, that we are waging an
intensive war against the oppressors of the world, the "only just war in history."
Kautsky yet again tears his hair because the Soviet Government, during the Civil
War, has made use of the severe method of taking hostages. He once again
brings forward pointless and dishonest comparisons between the fierce Soviet
Government and the humane Commune. Clear and definite in this connection
sounds the opinion of Marx. "When Thiers, from the very beginning of the
conflict, had enforced the humane practice of shooting down captured
Communards, the Commune, to protect the lives of those prisoners, had nothing
left for it but to resort to the Prussian custom of taking hostages. The lives of the
hostages had been forfeited over and over again by the continued shooting of the
prisoners on the part of the Versaillese. How could their lives be spared any
longer after the blood-bath with which MacMahon's Pretorians celebrated their
entry into Paris?" How otherwise we shall ask together with Marx, can one act in
conditions of civil war, when the counter-revolution, occupying a considerable
portion of the national territory, seizes wherever it can the unarmed workers,
their wives, their mothers, and shoots or hangs them: how otherwise can one act
than to seize as hostages the beloved or the trusted of the bourgeoisie, thus
placing the whole bourgeois class under the Damocles' sword of mutual
responsibility?
It would not be difficult to show, day by day through the history of the civil war,
that all the severe measures of the Soviet Government were forced upon it as
measures of revolutionary self-defense. We shall not here enter into details. But,
to give though it be but a partial criterion for valuing the conditions of the
struggle, let us remind the reader that, at the moment when the White Guards, in
company with their Anglo-French allies, shoot every Communist without
exception who falls into their hands, the Red Army spares all prisoners without
exception, including even officers of high rank.
"Fully grasping its historical task, filled with the heroic decision to remain equal
to that task," Marx wrote, "the working class may reply with a smile of calm
contempt to the vile abuse of the lackeys of the Press and to the learned
patronage of well-intentioned bourgeois doctrinaires, who utter their ignorant
stereotyped common-places, their characteristic nonsense, with the profound
tone of oracles of scientific immaculateness."
If the well-intentioned bourgeois doctrinaires sometimes appear in the guise of

retired theoreticians of the Second International, this in no way deprives their
characteristic nonsense of the right of remaining nonsense.
THE WORKING CLASS AND ITS SOVIET POLICY
THE RUSSIAN PROLETARIAT
The initiative in the social revolution proved, by the force of events, to be

imposed, not upon the old proletariat of Western Europe, with its mighty
economic and political organization, with its ponderous traditions of
parliamentarism and trade unionism, but upon the young working-class of a
backward country. History, as always, moved along the line of least resistance.
The revolutionary epoch burst upon us through the least barricaded door. Those
extraordinary, truly superhuman, difficulties which were thus flung upon the
Russian proletariat have prepared, hastened, and to a considerable extent assisted
the revolutionary work of the West European proletariat which still lies before
us.
Instead of examining the Russian Revolution in the light of the revolutionary

epoch that has arrived throughout the world, Kautsky discusses the theme of
whether or no the Russian proletariat has taken power into its hands too soon.
"For Socialism," he explains, "there is necessary a high development of the

people, a high morale amongst the masses, strongly-developed social instincts,
sentiments of solidarity, etc. Such a form of morale," Kautsky further informs
us, "was very highly developed amongst the proletariat of the Paris Commune. It
is absent amongst the masses which at the present time set the tone amongst the
Bolshevik proletariat." (Page 177.)
For Kautsky's purpose, it is not sufficient to fling mud at the Bolsheviks as a

political party before the eyes of his readers. Knowing that Bolshevism has
become amalgamated with the Russian proletariat, Kautsky makes an attempt to
fling mud at the Russian proletariat as a whole, representing it as an ignorant,
greedy mass, without any ideals, which is guided only by the instincts and
impulses of the moment.
Throughout his booklet Kautsky returns many times to the question of the
intellectual and moral level of the Russian workers, and every time only to
deepen his characterization of them as ignorant, stupid and barbarous. To bring
about the most striking contrasts, Kautsky adduces the example of how a
workshop committee in one of the war industries during the Commune decided
upon compulsory night duty in the works for one worker so that it might be
possible to distribute repaired arms by night. "As under present circumstances it
is absolutely necessary to be extremely economical with the resources of the
Commune," the regulation read, "the night duty will be rendered without
payment...." "Truly," Kautsky concludes, "these working men did not regard the
period of their dictatorship as an opportune moment for the satisfaction of their
personal interests." (Page 90.) Quite otherwise is the case with the Russian
working class. That class has no intelligence, no stability, no ideals, no
steadfastness, no readiness for self-sacrifice, and so on. "It is just as little capable
of choosing suitable plenipotentiary leaders for itself," Kautsky jeers, "as
Munchausen was able to drag himself from the swamp by means of his own
hair." This comparison of the Russian proletariat with the impostor Munchausen
dragging himself from the swamp is a striking example of the brazen tone in
which Kautsky speaks of the Russian working class.
He brings extracts from various speeches and articles of ours in which

undesirable phenomena amongst the working class are shown up, and attempts
to represent matters in such a way as if the life of the Russian proletariat
between 1917-20--i.e., in the greatest of revolutionary epochs--is fully described
by passivity, ignorance, and egotism.
Kautsky, forsooth, does not know, has never heard, cannot guess, may not
imagine, that during the civil war the Russian proletariat had more than one
occasion of freely giving its labour, and even of establishing "unpaid" guard
duties--not of one worker for the space of one night, but of tens of thousands of
workers for the space of a long series of disturbed nights. In the days and weeks
of Yudenich's advance on Petrograd, one telephonogram of the Soviet was
sufficient to ensure that many thousands of workers should spring to their posts
in all the factories, in all the wards of the city. And this not in the first days of
the Petrograd Commune, but after a two years' struggle in cold and hunger.
Two or three times a year our party mobilizes a high proportion of its numbers
for the front. Scattered over a distance of 8,000 versts, they die and teach others
to die. And when, in hungry and cold Moscow, which has given the flower of its
workers to the front, a Party Week is proclaimed, there pour into our ranks from
the proletarian masses, in the space of seven days, 15,000 persons. And at what
moment? At the moment when the danger of the destruction of the Soviet
Government had reached its most acute point. At the moment when Orel had
been taken, and Denikin was approaching Tula and Moscow, when Yudenich
was threatening Petrograd. At that most painful moment, the Moscow
proletariat, in the course of a week, gave to the ranks of our party 15,000 men,
who only waited a new mobilization for the front. And it can be said with
certainty that never yet, with the exception of the week of the November rising
in 1917, was the Moscow proletariat so single-minded in its revolutionary
enthusiasm, and in its readiness for devoted struggle, as in those most difficult
days of peril and self-sacrifice.
When our party proclaimed the watchword of Subbotniks and Voskresniks

(Communist Saturdays and Sundays), the revolutionary idealism of the
proletariat found for itself a striking expression in the shape of voluntary labor.
At first tens and hundreds, later thousands, and now tens and hundreds of
thousands of workers every week give up several hours of their labor without
reward, for the sake of the economic reconstruction of the country. And this is
done by half-starved people, in torn boots, in dirty linen--because the country
has neither boots nor soap. Such, in reality, is that Bolshevik proletariat to whom
Kautsky recommends a course of self-sacrifice. The facts of the situation, and
their relative importance, will appear still more vividly before us if we recall that
all the egoist, bourgeois, coarsely selfish elements of the proletariat--all those
who avoid service at the front and in the Subbotniks, who engage in speculation
and in weeks of starvation incite the workers to strikes--all of them vote at the
Soviet elections for the Mensheviks; that is, for the Russian Kautskies.
Kautsky quotes our words to the effect that, even before the November
Revolution, we clearly realized the defects in education of the Russian
proletariat, but, recognizing the inevitability of the transference of power to the
working class, we considered ourselves justified in hoping that during the
struggle itself, during its experience, and with the ever-increasing support of the
proletariat of other countries, we should deal adequately with our difficulties,
and be able to guarantee the transition of Russia to the Socialist order. In this
connection, Kautsky asks: "Would Trotsky undertake to get on a locomotive and
set it going, in the conviction that he would during the journey have time to learn
and to arrange everything? One must preliminarily have acquired the qualities
necessary to drive a locomotive before deciding to set it going. Similarly the
proletariat ought beforehand to have acquired those necessary qualities which
make it capable of administering industry, once it had to take it over." (Page
173.)
This instructive comparison would have done honor to any village clergyman.
None the less, it is stupid. With infinitely more foundation one could say: "Will
Kautsky dare to mount a horse before he has learned to sit firmly in the saddle,
and to guide the animal in all its steps?" We have foundations for believing that
Kautsky would not make up his mind to such a dangerous purely Bolshevik
experiment. On the other hand, we fear that, through not risking to mount the
horse, Kautsky would have considerable difficulty in learning the secrets of
riding on horse-back. For the fundamental Bolshevik prejudice is precisely this:
that one learns to ride on horse-back only when sitting on the horse.
Concerning the driving of the locomotive, this principle is at first sight not so
evident; but none the less it is there. No one yet has learned to drive a
locomotive sitting in his study. One has to get up on to the engine, to take one's
stand in the tender, to take into one's hands the regulator, and to turn it. True, the
engine allows training manoeuvres only under the guidance of an old driver. The
horse allows of instructions in the riding school only under the guidance of
experienced trainers. But in the sphere of State administration such artificial
conditions cannot be created. The bourgeoisie does not build for the proletariat
academies of State administration, and does not place at its disposal, for
preliminary practice, the helm of the State. And besides, the workers and
peasants learn even to ride on horse-back not in the riding school, and without
the assistance of trainers.
To this we must add another consideration, perhaps the most important. No one
gives the proletariat the opportunity of choosing whether it will or will not
mount the horse, whether it will take power immediately or postpone the
moment. Under certain conditions the working class is bound to take power,
under the threat of political self-annihilation for a whole historical period.
Once having taken power, it is impossible to accept one set of consequences at

will and refuse to accept others. If the capitalist bourgeoisie consciously and
malignantly transforms the disorganization of production into a method of
political struggle, with the object of restoring power to itself, the proletariat is
obliged to resort to Socialization, independently of whether this is beneficial or
otherwise at the given moment.
And, once having taken over production, the proletariat is obliged, under the
pressure of iron necessity, to learn by its own experience a most difficult
art--that of organizing Socialist economy. Having mounted the saddle, the rider
is obliged to guide the horse--on the peril of breaking his neck.
*****
To give his high-souled supporters, male and female, a complete picture of the
moral level of the Russian proletariat, Kautsky adduces, on page 172 of his
book, the following mandate, issued, it is alleged, by the Murzilovka Soviet:
"The Soviet hereby empowers Comrade Gregory Sareiev, in accordance with his
choice and instructions, to requisition and lead to the barracks, for the use of the
Artillery Division stationed in Murzilovka, Briansk County, sixty women and
girls from the bourgeois and speculating class, September 16, 1918." (What are
the Bolshevists doing? Published by Dr. Nath. Wintch-Malejeff. Lausanne, 1919.
Page 10.)
Without having the least doubt of the forged character of this document and the
lying nature of the whole communication, I gave instructions, however, that
careful inquiry should be made, in order to discover what facts and episodes lay
at the root of this invention. A carefully carried out investigation showed the
following:--
(1) In the Briansk County there is absolutely no village by the name of

Murzilovka. There is no such village in the neighboring counties either. The
most similar in name is the village of Muraviovka, Briansk County; but no
artillery division has ever been stationed there, and altogether nothing ever took
place which might be in any way connected with the above "document."
(2) The investigation was also carried on along the line of the artillery units.
Absolutely nowhere were we able to discover even an indirect allusion to a fact
similar to that adduced by Kautsky from the words of his inspirer.
(3) Finally the investigation dealt with the question of whether there had been
any rumors of this kind on the spot. Here, too, absolutely nothing was
discovered; and no wonder. The very contents of the forgery are in too brutal a
contrast with the morals and public opinion of the foremost workers and
peasants who direct the work of the Soviets, even in the most backward regions.
In this way, the document must be described as a pitiful forgery, which might be
circulated only by the most malignant sycophants in the most yellow of the
gutter press.
While the investigation described above was going on, Comrade Zinovieff
showed me a number of a Swedish paper (Svenska Dagbladet) of November 9,
1919, in which was printed the facsimile of a mandate running as follows:--
"Mandate. The bearer of this, Comrade Karaseiev, has the right of socializing in
the town of Ekaterinodar (obliterated) girls aged from 16 to 36 at his
pleasure.--GLAVKOM IVASHCHEFF."
This document is even more stupid and impudent than that quoted by Kautsky.
The town of Ekaterinodar--the centre of the Kuban--was, as is well known, for
only a very short time in the hands of the Soviet Government. Apparently the
author of the forgery, not very well up in his revolutionary chronology, rubbed
out the date on this document, lest by some chance it should appear that
"Glavkom Ivashcheff" socialized the Ekaterinodar women during the reign of
Denikin's militarism there. That the document might lead into error the
thick-witted Swedish bourgeois is not at all amazing. But for the Russian reader
it is only too clear that the document is not merely a forgery, but drawn up by a
foreigner, dictionary in hand. It is extremely curious that the names of both the
socializers of women, "Gregory Sareiev" and "Karaseiev" sound absolutely

non-Russia. The ending "eiev" in Russian names is found rarely, and only in
definite combinations. But the accuser of the Bolsheviks himself, the author of
the English pamphlet on whom Kautsky bases his evidence, has a name that does
actually end in "eiev." It seems obvious that this Anglo-Bulgarian police agent,
sitting in Lausanne, creates socializers of women, in the fullest sense of the
word, after his own likeness and image.
Kautsky, at any rate, has original inspirers and assistants!
SOVIETS, TRADE UNIONS, AND THE PARTY
The Soviets, as a form of the organization of the working class, represents for
Kautsky, "in relation to the party and professional organizations of more
developed countries, not a higher form of organization, but first and foremost a
substitute (Notbehelf), arising out of the absence of political organizations."
(Page 68.)
Let us grant that this is true in connection with Russia. But then, why have
Soviets sprung up in Germany? Ought one not absolutely to repudiate them in
the Ebert Republic? We note, however, that Hilferding, the nearest sympathizer
of Kautsky, proposes to include the Soviets in the Constitution. Kautsky is silent.
The estimate of Soviets as a "primitive" organization is true to the extent that the
open revolutionary struggle is "more primitive" than parliamentarism. But the
artificial complexity of the latter embraces only the upper strata, insignificant in
their size. On the other hand, revolution is only possible where the masses have
their vital interests at stake. The November Revolution raised on to their feet
such deep layers as the pre-revolutionary Social-Democracy could not even
dream of. However wide were the organizations of the party and the trade unions
in Germany, the revolution immediately proved incomparably wider than they.
The revolutionary masses found their direct representation in the most simple
and generally comprehensive delegate organization--in the Soviet. One may
admit that the Council of Deputies falls behind both the party and the trade union
in the sense of the clearness of its programme, or the exactness of its
organization. But it is far and away in front of the party and the trade unions in
the size of the masses drawn by it into the organized struggle; and this
superiority in quality gives the Soviet undeniable revolutionary preponderance.
The Soviet embraces workers of all undertakings, of all professions, of all stages
of cultural development, all stages of political consciousness--and thereby
objectively is forced to formulate the general interests of the proletariat.
The Communist Manifesto viewed the problem of the Communist just in this
sense--namely, the formulating of the general historical interests of the working
class as a whole.
"The Communists are only distinguished from other proletarian parties," in the
words of the Manifesto, "by this: that in the different national struggles of the
proletariat they point out, and bring to the fore, the common interests of the
proletariat, independently of nationality; and again that, in the different stages of
evolution through which the struggle between the proletariat and bourgeoisie
passes, they constantly represent the interests of the movement taken as a
whole."
In the form of the all-embracing class organization of the Soviets, the movement
takes itself "as a whole." Hence it is clear why the Communists could and had to
become the guiding party in the Soviets. But hence also is seen all the
narrowness of the estimate of Soviets as "substitutes for the party" (Kautsky),
and all the stupidity of the attempt to include the Soviets, in the form of an
auxiliary lever, in the mechanism of bourgeois democracy. (Hilferding.)
The Soviets are the organization of the proletarian revolution, and have purpose
either as an organ of the struggle for power or as the apparatus of power of the
working class.
Unable to grasp the revolutionary role of the Soviets, Kautsky sees their root
defects in that which constitutes their greatest merit. "The demarcation of the
bourgeois from the worker," he writes, "can never be actually drawn. There will
always be something arbitrary in such demarcation, which fact transforms the
Soviet idea into a particularly suitable foundation for dictatorial and arbitrary
rule, but renders it unfitted for the creation of a clear, systematically built-up
constitution." (Page 170.)
Class dictatorship, according to Kautsky, cannot create for itself institutions

answering to its nature, because there do not exist lines of demarcation between
the classes. But in that case, what happens to the class struggle altogether?
Surely it was just, in the existence of numerous transitional stages between the
bourgeoisie and the proletariat, that the lower middle-class theoreticians always
found their principal argument against the "principle" of the class struggle? For
Kautsky, however, doubts as to principle begin just at the point where the
proletariat, having overcome the shapelessness and unsteadiness of the
intermediate class, having brought one part of them over to its side and thrown
the remainder into the camp of the bourgeoisie, has actually organized its
dictatorship in the Soviet Constitution.
The very reason why the Soviets an absolutely irreplaceable apparatus in the
proletarian State is that their framework is elastic and yielding, with the result
that not only social but political changes in the relationship of classes and
sections can immediately find their expression in the Soviet apparatus.
Beginning with the largest factories and works, the Soviets then draw into their
organization the workers of private workshops and shop-assistants, proceed to
enter the village, organize the peasants against the landowners, and finally the
lower and middle-class sections of the peasantry against the richest.
The Labor State collects numerous staffs of employees, to a considerable extent

from the ranks of the bourgeoisie and the bourgeois educated classes. To the
extent that they become disciplined under the Soviet regime, they find
representation in the Soviet system. Expanding--and at certain moments
contracting--in harmony with the expansion and contraction of the social
positions conquered by the proletariat, the Soviet system remains the State
apparatus of the social revolution, in its internal dynamics, its ebbs and flows, its
mistakes and successes. With the final triumph of the social revolution, the
Soviet system will expand and include the whole population, in order thereby to
lose the characteristics of a form of State, and melt away into a mighty system of
producing and consuming co-operation.
If the party and the trade unions were organizations of preparation for the
revolution, the Soviets are the weapon of the revolution itself. After its victory,
the Soviets become the organs of power. The role of the party and the unions,
without decreasing is nevertheless essentially altered.
In the hands of the party is concentrated the general control. It does not
immediately administer, since its apparatus is not adapted for this purpose. But it
has the final word in all fundamental questions. Further, our practice has led to
the result that, in all moot questions, generally--conflicts between departments

and personal conflicts within departments--the last word belongs to the Central
Committee of the party. This affords extreme economy of time and energy, and
in the most difficult and complicated circumstances gives a guarantee for the
necessary unity of action. Such a regime is possible only in the presence of the
unquestioned authority of the party, and the faultlessness of its discipline.
Happily for the revolution, our party does possess in an equal measure both of
these qualities. Whether in other countries which have not received from their
past a strong revolutionary organization, with a great hardening in conflict, there
will be created just as authoritative a Communist Party by the time of the
proletarian revolution, it is difficult to foretell; but it is quite obvious that on this
question, to a very large extent, depends the progress of the Socialist revolution
in each country.
The exclusive role of the Communist Party under the conditions of a victorious
proletarian revolution is quite comprehensible. The question is of the
dictatorship of a class. In the composition of that class there enter various
elements, heterogeneous moods, different levels of development. Yet the
dictatorship pre-supposes unity of will, unity of direction, unity of action. By
what other path then can it be attained? The revolutionary supremacy of the
proletariat pre-supposes within the proletariat itself the political supremacy of a
party, with a clear programme of action and a faultless internal discipline.
The policy of coalitions contradicts internally the regime of the revolutionary

dictatorship. We have in view, not coalitions with bourgeois parties, of which of
course there can be no talk, but a coalition of Communists with other "Socialist"
organizations, representing different stages of backwardness and prejudice of the
laboring masses.
The revolution swiftly reveals all that is unstable, wears out all that is artificial;
the contradictions glossed over in a coalition are swiftly revealed under the
pressure of revolutionary events. We have had an example of this in Hungary,
where the dictatorship of the proletariat assumed the political form of the
coalition of the Communists with disguised Opportunists. The coalition soon
broke up. The Communist Party paid heavily for the revolutionary instability and
the political treachery of its companions. It is quite obvious that for the
Hungarian Communists it would have been more profitable to have come to
power later, after having afforded to the Left Opportunists the possibility of
compromising themselves once and for all. It is quite another question as to how
far this was possible. In any case, a coalition with the Opportunists, only
temporarily hiding the relative weakness of the Hungarian Communists, at the
same time prevented them from growing stronger at the expense of the
Opportunists; and brought them to disaster.
The same idea is sufficiently illustrated by the example of the Russian

revolution. The coalition of the Bolsheviks with the Left Socialist
Revolutionists, which lasted for several months, ended with a bloody conflict.
True, the reckoning for the coalition had to be paid, not so much by us
Communists as by our disloyal companions. Apparently, such a coalition, in
which we were the stronger side and, therefore, were not taking too many risks
in the attempt, at one definite stage in history, to make use of the extreme
Left-wing of the bourgeois democracy, tactically must be completely justified.
But, none the less, the Left S.R. episode quite clearly shows that the regime of
compromises, agreements, mutual concessions--for that is the meaning of the
regime of coalition--cannot last long in an epoch in which situations alter with
extreme rapidity, and in which supreme unity in point of view is necessary in
order to render possible unity of action.
We have more than once been accused of having substituted for the dictatorship
of the Soviets the dictatorship of our party. Yet it can be said with complete
justice that the dictatorship of the Soviets became possible only by means of the
dictatorship of the party. It is thanks to the clarity of its theoretical vision and its
strong revolutionary organization that the party has afforded to the Soviets the
possibility of becoming transformed from shapeless parliaments of labor into the
apparatus of the supremacy of labor. In this "substitution" of the power of the
party for the power of the working class there is nothing accidental, and in
reality there is no substitution at all. The Communists express the fundamental
interests of the working class. It is quite natural that, in the period in which
history brings up those interests, in all their magnitude, on to the order of the
day, the Communists have become the recognized representatives of the working
class as a whole.
But where is your guarantee, certain wise men ask us, that it is just your party
that expresses the interests of historical development? Destroying or driving
underground the other parties, you have thereby prevented their political
competition with you, and consequently you have deprived yourselves of the
possibility of testing your line of action.
This idea is dictated by a purely liberal conception of the course of the

revolution. In a period in which all antagonisms assume an open character, and
the political struggle swiftly passes into a civil war, the ruling party has
sufficient material standard by which to test its line of action, without the
possible circulation of Menshevik papers. Noske crushes the Communists, but
they grow. We have suppressed the Mensheviks and the S.R.s--and they have
disappeared. This criterion is sufficient for us. At all events, our problem is not
at every given moment statistically to measure the grouping of tendencies; but to
render victory for our tendency secure. For that tendency is the tendency of the
revolutionary dictatorship; and in the course of the latter, in its internal friction,
we must find a sufficient criterion for self-examination.
The continuous "independence" of the trade union movement, in the period of

the proletarian revolution, is just as much an impossibility as the policy of
coalition. The trade unions become the most important economic organs of the
proletariat in power. Thereby they fall under the leadership of the Communist
Party. Not only questions of principle in the trade union movement, but serious
conflicts of organization within it, are decided by the Central Committee of our
party.
The Kautskians attack the Soviet Government as the dictatorship of a "section"

of the working class. "If only," they say, "the dictatorship was carried out by the
whole class!" It is not easy to understand what actually they imagine when they
say this. The dictatorship of the proletariat, in its very essence, signifies the
immediate supremacy of the revolutionary vanguard, which relies upon the
heavy masses, and, where necessary, obliges the backward tail to dress by the
head. This refers also to the trade unions. After the conquest of power by the
proletariat, they acquire a compulsory character. They must include all industrial
workers. The party, on the other hand, as before, includes in its ranks only the
most class-conscious and devoted; and only in a process of careful selection does
it widen its ranks. Hence follows the guiding role of the Communist minority in
the trade unions, which answers to the supremacy of the Communist Party in the
Soviets, and represents the political expression of the dictatorship of the
proletariat.
The trade unions become the direct organizers of social production. They
express not only the interests of the industrial workers, but the interests of
industry itself. During the first period, the old currents in trade unionism more
than once raised their head, urging the unions to haggle with the Soviet State, lay
down conditions for it, and demand from it guarantees. The further we go,
however, the more do the unions recognize that they are organs of production of
the Soviet State, and assume responsibility for its fortunes--not opposing
themselves to it, but identifying themselves with it. The unions become the
organizers of labor discipline. They demand from the workers intensive labor
under the most difficult conditions, to the extent that the Labor State is not yet
able to alter those conditions.
The unions become the apparatus of revolutionary repression against

undisciplined, anarchical, parasitic elements in the working class. From the old
policy of trade unionism, which at a certain stage is inseparable from the
industrial movement within the framework of capitalist society, the unions pass
along the whole line on to the new path of the policy of revolutionary
Communism.
THE PEASANT POLICY
The Bolsheviks "hoped," Kautsky thunders, "to overcome the substantial

peasants in the villages by granting political rights exclusively to the poorest
peasants. They then again granted representation to the substantial peasantry."
(Page 216.)
Kautsky enumerates the external "contradictions" of our peasant policy, not

dreaming to inquire into its general direction, and into the internal contradictions
visible in the economic and political situation of the country.
In the Russian peasantry as it entered the Soviet order there were three elements:
the poor, living to a considerable extent by the sale of their labor-power, and
forced to buy additional food for their requirements; the middle peasants, whose
requirements were covered by the products of their farms, and who were able to
a limited extent to sell their surplus; and the upper layer--i.e., the rich peasants,
the vulture (kulak) class, which systematically bought labor-power and sold their
agricultural produce on a large scale. It is quite unnecessary to point out that
these groups are not distinguished by definite symptoms or by homogeneousness
throughout the country.
Still, on the whole, and generally speaking, the peasant poor represented the
natural and undeniable allies of the town proletariat, whilst the vulture class
represented its just as undeniable and irreconcilable enemies. The most
hesitation was principally to be observed amongst the widest, the middle section
of the peasantry.
Had not the country been so exhausted, and if the proletariat had had the
possibility of offering to the peasant masses the necessary quantity of
commodities and cultural requirements, the adaptation of the toiling majority of
the peasantry to the new regime would have taken place much less painfully. But
the economic disorder of the country, which was not the result of our land or
food policy, but was generated by the causes which preceded the appearance of
that policy, robbed the town for a prolonged period of any possibility of giving
the village the products of the textile and metal-working industries, imported
goods, and so on. At the same time, industry could not entirely cease drawing
from the village all, albeit the smallest quantity, of its food resources. The
proletariat demanded of the peasantry the granting of food credits, economic
subsidies in respect of values which it is only now about to create. The symbol
of those future values was the credit symbol, now finally deprived of all value.
But the peasant mass is not very capable of historical detachment. Bound up
with the Soviet Government by the abolition of landlordism, and seeing in it a
guarantee against the restoration of Tsarism, the peasantry at the same time not
infrequently opposes the collection of corn, considering it a bad bargain so long
as it does not itself receive printed calico, nails, and kerosine.
The Soviet Government naturally strove to impose the chief weight of the food
tax upon the upper strata of the village. But, in the unformed social conditions of
the village, the influential peasantry, accustomed to lead the middle peasants in
its train, found scores of methods of passing on the food tax from itself to the
wide masses of the peasantry, thereby placing them in a position of hostility and
opposition to the Soviet power. It was necessary to awaken in the lower ranks of
the peasantry suspicion and hostility towards the speculating upper strata. This
purpose was served by the Committees of Poverty. They were built up of the
rank and file, of elements who in the last epoch were oppressed, driven into a
dark corner, deprived of their rights. Of course, in their midst there turned out to
be a certain number of semi-parasitic elements. This served as the chief text for
the demagogues amongst the populist "Socialists," whose speeches found a

grateful echo in the hearts of the village vultures. But the mere fact of the
transference of power to the village poor had an immeasurable revolutionary
significance. For the guidance of the village semi-proletarians, there were
despatched from the towns parties from amongst the foremost workers, who
accomplished invaluable work in the villages. The Committees of Poverty
became shock battalions against the vulture class. Enjoying the support of the
State, they thereby obliged the middle section of the peasantry to choose, not
only between the Soviet power and the power of the landlords, but between the
dictatorship of the proletariat and the semi-proletarian elements of the village on
the one hand, and the yoke of the rich speculators on the other. By a series of
lessons, some of which were very severe, the middle peasantry was obliged to
become convinced that the Soviet regime, which had driven away the landlords
and bailiffs, in its turn imposes new duties upon the peasantry, and demands
sacrifices from them. The political education of tens of millions of the middle
peasantry did not take place as easily and smoothly as in the school-room, and it
did not give immediate and unquestionable results. There were risings of the
middle peasants, uniting with the speculators, and always in such cases falling
under the leadership of White Guard landlords; there were abuses committed by
local agents of the Soviet Government, particularly by those of the Committees
of Poverty. But the fundamental political end was attained. The powerful class of
rich peasantry, if it was not finally annihilated, proved to be shaken to its
foundations, with its self-reliance undermined. The middle peasantry, remaining
politically shapeless, just as it is economically shapeless, began to learn to find
its representative in the foremost worker, as before it found it in the noisy village
speculator. Once this fundamental result was achieved, the Committees of
Poverty, as temporary institutions, as a sharp wedge driven into the village
masses, had to yield their place to the Soviets, in which the village poor are
represented side by side with the middle peasantry.
The Committees of Poverty existed about six months, from June to December,
1918. In their institution, as in their abolition, Kautsky sees nothing but the
"waverings" of Soviet policy. Yet at the same time he himself has not even a
suspicion of any practical lessons to be drawn. And after all, how should he
think of them? Experience such as we are acquiring in this respect knows no
precedent; and questions and problems such as the Soviet Government is now
solving in practice have no solution in books. What Kautsky calls contradictions
in policy are, in reality, the active manoeuvring of the proletariat in the spongy,
undivided, peasant mass. The sailing ship has to manoeuvre before the wind; yet
no one will see contradictions in the manoeuvres which finally bring the ship to
harbor.
In questions as to agricultural communes and Soviet farms, there could also be

found not a few "contradictions," in which, side by side with individual
mistakes, there are expressed various stages of the revolution. What quantity of
land shall the Soviet State leave for itself in the Ukraine, and what quantity shall
it hand over to the peasants; what policy shall it lay down for the agricultural
communes; in what form shall it give them support, so as not to make them the
nursery for parasitism; in what form is control to be organized over them--all
these are absolutely new problems of Socialist economic construction, which
have been settled beforehand neither theoretically nor practically, and in the
settling of which the general principles of our programme have even yet to find
their actual application and their testing in practice, by means of inevitable
temporary deviations to right or left.
But even the very fact that the Russian proletariat has found support in the
peasantry Kautsky turns against us. "This has introduced into the Soviet regime
an economically reactionary element which was spared (!) the Paris Commune,
as its dictatorship did not rely on peasant Soviets."
As if in reality we could accept the heritage of the feudal and bourgeois order
with the possibility of excluding from it at will "an economically reactionary
element"! Nor is this all. Having poisoned the Soviet regime by its "reactionary
element," the peasantry has deprived us of its support. To-day it "hates" the
Bolsheviks. All this Kautsky knows very certainly from the radios of
Clémenceau and the squibs of the Mensheviks.
In reality, what is true is that wide masses of the peasantry are suffering from the
absence of the essential products of industry. But it is just as true that every other
regime--and there were not a few of them, in various parts of Russia, during the
last three years--proved infinitely more oppressive for the shoulders of the
peasantry. Neither monarchical nor democratic governments were able to
increase their stores of manufactured goods. Both of them found themselves in
need of the peasant's corn and the peasant's horses. To carry out their policy, the
bourgeois governments--including the Kautskian-Menshevik variety--made use
of a purely bureaucratic apparatus, which reckons with the requirements of the
peasant's farm to an infinitely less degree than the Soviet apparatus, which
consists of workers and peasants. As a result, the middle peasant, in spite of his
waverings, his dissatisfaction, and even his risings, ultimately always comes to
the conclusion that, however difficult it is for him at present under the
Bolsheviks, under every other regime it would be infinitely more difficult for
him. It is quite true that the Commune was "spared" peasant support. But in
return the Commune was not spared annihilation by the peasant armies of
Thiers! Whereas our army, four-fifths of whom are peasants, is fighting with
enthusiasm and with success for the Soviet Republic. And this one fact,
controverting Kautsky and those inspiring him, gives the best possible verdict on
the peasant policy of the Soviet Government.
THE SOVIET GOVERNMENT AND THE EXPERTS
"The Bolsheviks at first thought they could manage without the intelligentsia,
without the experts," Kautsky narrates to us. (Page 191.) But then, becoming
convinced of the necessity of the intelligentsia, they abandoned their severe
repressions, and attempted to attract them to work by all sorts of measures,
incidentally by giving them extremely high salaries. "In this way," Kautsky says
ironically, "the true path, the true method of attracting experts consists in first of
all giving them a thorough good hiding." ( Page 192.) Quite so. With all due
respect to all philistines, the dictatorship of the proletariat does just consist in
"giving a hiding" to the classes that were previously supreme, before forcing
them to recognize the new order and to submit to it.
The professional intelligentsia, brought up with a prejudice about the

omnipotence of the bourgeoisie, long would not, could not, and did not believe
that the working class is really capable of governing the country; that it seized
power not by accident; and that the dictatorship of the proletariat is an
insurmountable fact. Consequently, the bourgeois intelligentsia treated its duties
to the Labor State extremely lightly, even when it entered its service; and it
considered that to receive money from Wilson, Clémenceau or Mirbach for
anti-Soviet agitation, or to hand over military secrets and technical resources to
White Guards and foreign imperialists, is a quite natural and obvious course
under the regime of the proletariat. It became necessary to show it in practice,
and to show it severely, that the proletariat had not seized power in order to
allow such jokes to be played off at its expense.
In the severe penalties adopted in the case of the intelligentsia, our bourgeois
idealist sees the "consequence of a policy which strove to attract the educated
classes, not by means of persuasion, but by means of kicks from before and
behind." (Page 193.) In this way, Kautsky seriously imagines that it is possible
to attract the bourgeois intelligentsia to the work of Socialist construction by
means of mere persuasion--and this in conditions when, in all other countries,
there is still supreme the bourgeoisie which hesitates at no methods of terrifying,
flattering, or buying over the Russian intelligentsia and making it a weapon for
the transformation of Russia into a colony of slaves.
Instead of analyzing the course of the struggle, Kautsky, when dealing with the
intelligentsia, gives once again merely academical recipes. It is absolutely false
that our party had the idea of managing without the intelligentsia, not realizing to
the full its importance for the economic and cultural work that lay before us. On
the contrary. When the struggle for the conquest and consolidation of power was
in full blast, and the majority of the intelligentsia was playing the part of a shock
battalion of the bourgeoisie, fighting against us openly or sabotaging our
institutions, the Soviet power fought mercilessly with the experts, precisely
because it knew their enormous importance from the point of view of
organization so long as they do not attempt to carry on an independent
"democratic" policy and execute the orders of one of the fundamental classes of
society. Only after the opposition of the intelligentsia had been broken by a
severe struggle did the possibility open before us of enlisting the assistance of
the experts. We immediately entered that path. It proved not as simple as it
might have seemed at first. The relations which existed under capitalist
conditions between the working man and the director, the clerk and the manager,
the soldier and the officer, left behind a very deep class distrust of the experts;
and that distrust had become still more acute during the first period of the civil
war, when the intelligentsia did its utmost to break the labor revolution by
hunger and cold. It was not easy to outlive this frame of mind, and to pass from
the first violent antagonism to peaceful collaboration. The laboring masses had
gradually to become accustomed to see in the engineer, the agricultural expert,
the officer, not the oppressor of yesterday but the useful worker of to-day--a
necessary expert, entirely under the orders of the Workers' and Peasants'
Government.
We have already said that Kautsky is wrong when he attributes to the Soviet
Government the desire to replace experts by proletarians. But that such a desire
was bound to spring up in wide circles of the proletariat cannot be denied. A

young class which had proved to its own satisfaction that it was capable of
overcoming the greatest obstacles in its path, which had torn to pieces the veil of
mystery which had hitherto surrounded the power of the propertied classes,
which had realized that all good things on the earth were not the direct gift of
heaven--that a revolutionary class was naturally inclined, in the person of the
less mature of its elements, at first to over-estimate its capacity for solving each
and every problem, without having recourse to the aid of experts educated by the
bourgeoisie.
It was not merely yesterday that we began the struggle with such tendencies, in
so far as they assumed a definite character. "To-day, when the power of the
Soviets has been set on a firm footing," we said at the Moscow City Conference
on March 28, 1918, "the struggle with sabotage must express itself in the form of
transforming the saboteurs of yesterday into the servants, executive officials,
technical guides, of the new regime, wherever it requires them. If we do not
grapple with this, if we do not attract all the forces necessary to us and enlist
them in the Soviet service, our struggle of yesterday with sabotage would
thereby be condemned as an absolutely vain and fruitless struggle.
"Just as in dead machines, so into those technical experts, engineers, doctors,

teachers, former officers, there is sunk a certain portion of our national capital,
which we are obliged to exploit and utilize if we want to solve the root problems
standing before us.
"Democratization does not at all consist--as every Marxist learns in his A B

C--in abolishing the meaning of skilled forces, the meaning of persons
possessing special knowledge, and in replacing them everywhere and anywhere
by elective boards.
"Elective boards, consisting of the best representatives of the working class, but
not equipped with the necessary technical knowledge, cannot replace one expert
who has passed through the technical school, and who knows how to carry out
the given technical work. That flood-tide of the collegiate principle which is at
present to be observed in all spheres is the quite natural reaction of a young,
revolutionary, only yesterday oppressed class, which is throwing out the
one-man principle of its rulers of yesterday--the landlords and the generals--and
everywhere is appointing its elected representatives. This, I say, is quite a natural
and, in its origin, quite a healthy revolutionary reaction; but it is not the last
word in the economic constructive work of the proletatarian proletarian class.
"The next step must consist in the self-limitation of the collegiate principle, in a
healthy and necessary act of self-limitation by the working class, which knows
where the decisive word can be spoken by the elected representatives of the
workers themselves, and where it is necessary to give way to a technical
specialist, who is equipped with certain knowledge, on whom a great measure of
responsibility must be laid, and who must be kept under careful political control.
But it is necessary to allow the expert freedom to act, freedom to create; because
no expert, be he ever so little gifted or capable, can work in his department when
subordinate in his own technical work to a board of men who do not know that
department. Political, collegiate and Soviet control everywhere and anywhere;
but for the executive functions, we must appoint technical experts, put them in
responsible positions, and impose responsibility upon them.
"Those who fear this are quite unconsciously adopting an attitude of profound
internal distrust towards the Soviet regime. Those who think that the enlisting of
the saboteurs of yesterday in the administration of technically expert posts
threatens the very foundations of the Soviet regime, do not realize that it is not
through the work of some engineer or of some general of yesterday that the
Soviet regime may stumble--in the political, in the revolutionary, in the military
sense, the Soviet regime is unconquerable. But it may stumble through its own
incapacity to grapple with the problems of creative organization. The Soviet
regime is bound to draw from the old institutions all that was vital and valuable
in them, and harness it on to the new work. If, comrades, we do not accomplish
this, we shall not deal successfully with our principal problems; for it would be
absolutely impossible for us to bring forth from our masses, in the shortest
possible time, all the necessary experts, and throw aside all that was accumulated
in the past.
"As a matter of fact, it would be just the same as if we said that all the machines
which hitherto had served to exploit the workers were now to be thrown aside. It
would be madness. The enlisting of scientific experts is for us just as essential as
the administration of the resources of production and transport, and all the
wealth of the country generally. We must, and in addition we must immediately,
bring under our control all the technical experts we possess, and introduce in
practice for them the principle of compulsory labor; at the same time leaving
them a wide margin of activity, and maintaining over them careful political
control."[7]
[7] Labor, Discipline, and Order will save the Socialist Soviet Republic
(Moscow, 1918). Kautsky knows this pamphlet, as he quotes from it several
times. This, however, does not prevent him passing over the passage quoted
above, which makes clear the attitude of the Soviet Government to the
intelligentsia.
The question of experts was particularly acute, from the very beginning, in the
War Department. Here, under the pressure of iron necessity, it was solved first.
In the sphere of administration of industry and transport, the necessary forms of

organization are very far from being attained, even to this day. We must seek the
reason in the fact that during the first two years we were obliged to sacrifice the
interests of industry and transport to the requirements of military defence. The
extremely changeable course of the civil war, in its turn, threw obstacles in the
way of the establishment of regular relations with the experts. Qualified
technicians of industry and transport, doctors, teachers, professors, either went
away with the retreating armies of Kolchak and Denikin, or were compulsorily
evacuated by them.
Only now, when the civil war is approaching its conclusion, is the intelligentsia
in its mass making its peace with the Soviet Government, or bowing before it.
Economic problems have acquired first-class importance. One of the most
important amongst them is the problem of the scientific organization of
production. Before the experts there opens a boundless field of activity. They are
being accorded the independence necessary for creative work. The general
control of industry on a national scale is concentrated in the hands of the Party of
the proletariat.
THE INTERNAL POLICY OF THE SOVIET GOVERNMENT
"The Bolsheviks," Kautsky mediates, "acquired the force necessary for the
seizure of political power through the fact that, amongst the political parties in
Russia, they were the most energetic in their demands for peace--peace at any
price, a separate peace--without interesting themselves as to the influence this
would have on the general international situation, as to whether this would assist
the victory and world domination of the German military monarchy, under the
protection of which they remained for a long time, just like Indian or Irish rebels
or Italian anarchists." (Page 53.)
Of the reasons for our victory, Kautsky knows only the one that we stood for
peace. He does not explain the Soviet Government has continued to exist now
that it has again mobilized a most important proportion of the soldiers of the
imperial army, in order for two years successfully to combat its political
enemies.
The watchword of peace undoubtedly played an enormous part in our struggle;

but precisely because it was directed against the imperialist war. The idea of
peace was supported most strongly of all, not by the tired soldiers, but by the
foremost workers, for whom it had the import, not for a rest, but of a pitiless
struggle against the exploiters. It was those same workers who, under the
watchword of peace, later laid down their lives on the Soviet fronts.
The affirmation that we demanded peace without reckoning on the effect it

would have on the international situation is a belated echo of Cadet and
Menshevik slanders. The comparison of us with the Germanophile nationalists
of India and Ireland seeks its justification in the fact that German imperialism
did actually attempt to make use of us as it did the Indians and the Irish. But the
chauvinists of France spared no efforts to make use of Liebknecht and
Luxemburg--even of Kautsky and Bernstein--in their own interests. The whole
question is, did we allow ourselves to be utilized? Did we, by our conduct, give
the European workers even the shadow of a ground to place us in the same
category as German imperialism? It is sufficient to remember the course of the
Brest negotiations, their breakdown, and the German advance of February, 1918,
to reveal all the cynicism of Kautsky's accusation. In reality, there was no peace
for a single day between ourselves and German imperialism. On the Ukrainian
and Caucasian fronts, we, in the measure of our then extremely feeble energies,
continued to wage war without openly calling it such. We were too weak to
organize war along the whole Russo-German front. We maintained persistently
the fiction of peace, utilizing the fact that the chief German forces were drawn
away to the west. If German imperialism did prove sufficiently powerful, in
1917-18, to impose upon us the Brest Peace, after all our efforts to tear that
noose from our necks, one of the principal reasons was the disgraceful behavior
of the German Social-Democratic Party, of which Kautsky remained an integral
and essential part. The Brest Peace was pre-determined on August 4, 1914. At
that moment, Kautsky not only did not declare war against German militarism,
as he later demanded from the Soviet Government, which was in 1918 still
powerless from a military point of view; Kautsky actually proposed voting for
the War Credits, "under certain conditions"; and generally behaved in such a
way that for months it was impossible to discover whether he stood for the War
or against it. And this political coward, who at the decisive moment gave up the
principal positions of Socialism, dares to accuse us of having found ourselves
obliged, at a certain moment, to retreat--not in principle, but materially. And
why? Because we were betrayed by the German Social-Democracy, corrupted
by Kautskianism--i.e., by political prostitution disguised by theories.
We did concern ourselves with the international situation! In reality, we had a

much more profound criterion by which to judge the international situation; and
it did not deceive us. Already before the February Revolution the Russian Army
no longer existed as a fighting force. Its final collapse was pre-determined. If the
February Revolution had not taken place, Tsarism would have come to an
agreement with the German monarchy. But the February Revolution which
prevented that finally destroyed the army built on a monarchist basis, precisely
because it was a revolution. A month sooner or later the army was bound to fall
to pieces. The military policy of Kerensky was the policy of an ostrich. He
closed his eyes to the decomposition of the army, talked sounding phrases, and
uttered verbal threats against German imperialism.
In such conditions, we had only one way out: to take our stand on the platform
of peace, as the inevitable conclusion from the military powerlessness of the
revolution, and to transform that watchword into the weapon of revolutionary
influence on all the peoples of Europe. That is, instead of, together with
Kerensky, peacefully awaiting the final military catastrophe--which might bury
the revolution in its ruins--we proposed to take possession of the watchword of
peace and to lead after it the proletariat of Europe--and first and foremost the
workers of Austro-Germany. It was in the light of this view that we carried on
our peace negotiations with the Central Empires, and it was in the light of this
that we drew up our Notes to the governments of the Entente. We drew out the
negotiations as long as we could, in order to give the European working masses
the possibility of realizing the meaning of the Soviet Government and its policy.
The January strike of 1918 in Germany and Austria showed that our efforts had
not been in vain. That strike was the first serious premonition of the German
Revolution. The German Imperialists understood then that it was just we who
represented for them a deadly danger. This is very strikingly shown in
Ludendorff's book. True, they could not risk any longer coming out against us in
an open crusade. But wherever they could fight against us secretly deceiving the
German workers with the help of the German Social-Democracy, they did so; in
the Ukraine, on the Don, in the Caucasus. In Central Russia, in Moscow, Count
Mirbach from the very first day of his arrival stood as the centre of
counter-revolutionary plots against the Soviet Government--just as Comrade
Yoffe in Berlin was in the closest possible touch with the revolution. The
Extreme Left group of the German revolutionary movement, the party of Karl
Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, all the time went hand in hand with us. The
German revolution at once took on the form of Soviets, and the German
proletariat, in spite of the Brest Peace, did not for a moment entertain any doubts
as to whether we were with Liebknecht or Ludendorff. In his evidence before the
Reichstag Commission in November, 1919, Ludendorff explained how "the
High Command demanded the creation of an institution with the object of
disclosing the connection of revolutionary tendencies in Germany with Russia.
Yoffe arrived in Berlin, and in various towns there were set up Russian
consulates. This had the most painful consequences in the army and navy."
Kautsky, however, has the audacity to write that "if matters did come to a
German revolution, truly it is not the Bolsheviks who are responsible for it."
(Page 162.)
Even if we had had the possibility in 1917-18, by means of revolutionary

abstention, of supporting the old Imperial Army instead of hastening its
destruction, we should have merely been assisting the Entente, and would have
covered up by our aid its brigands' peace with Germany, Austria, and all the
countries of the world generally. With such a policy we should at the decisive
moment have proved absolutely disarmed in the face of the Entente--still more
disarmed than Germany is to-day. Whereas, thanks to the November Revolution
and the Brest Peace we are to-day the only country which opposes the Entente
rifle in hand. By our international policy, we not only did not assist the
Hohenzollern to assume a position of world domination; on the contrary, by our
November Revolution we did more than anyone else to prepare his overthrow.
At the same time, we gained a military breathing-space, in the course of which
we created a large and strong army, the first army of the proletariat in history,
with which to-day not all the unleashed hounds of the Entente can cope.
The most critical moment in our international situation arose in the autumn of
1918, after the destruction of the German armies. In the place of two mighty
camps, more or less neutralizing each other, there stood before us the victorious
Entente, at the summit of its world power, and there lay broken Germany, whose
Junker blackguards would have considered it a happiness and an honor to spring
at the throat of the Russian proletariat for a bone from the kitchen of
Clemenceau. We proposed peace to the Entente, and were again ready--for we
were obliged--to sign the most painful conditions. But Clemenceau, in whose
imperialist rapacity there have remained in their full force all the characteristics
of lower-middle-class thick-headedness, refused the Junkers their bone, and at
the same time decided at all costs to decorate the Invalides with the scalps of the
leaders of the Soviet Republic. By this policy Clemenceau did us not a small
service. We defended ourselves successfully, and held out.
What, then, was the guiding principle of our external policy, once the first
months of existence of the Soviet Government had made clear the considerable
vitality as yet of the capitalist governments of Europe? Just that which Kautsky
accepts to-day uncomprehendingly as an accidental result--to hold out!
We realized too clearly that the very fact of the existence of the Soviet
Government is an event of the greatest revolutionary importance; and this
realization dictated to us our concessions and our temporary retirements--not in
principle but in practical conclusions from a sober estimate of our own forces.
We retreated like an army which gives up to the enemy a town, and even a
fortress, in order, having retreated, to concentrate its forces not only for defence
but for an advance. We retreated like strikers amongst whom to-day energies and
resources have been exhausted, but who, clenching their teeth, are preparing for
a new struggle. If we were not filled with an unconquerable belief in the world
significance of the Soviet dictatorship, we should not have accepted the most
painful sacrifices at Brest-Litovsk. If our faith had proved to be contradicted by
the actual course of events, the Brest Peace would have gone down to history as
the futile capitulation of a doomed regime. That is how the situation was judged
then, not only by the Kühlmanns, but also by the Kautskies of all countries. But
we proved right in our estimate, as of our weakness then, so of our strength in
the future. The existence of the Ebert Republic, with its universal suffrage, its
parliamentary swindling, its "freedom" of the Press, and its murder of labor
leaders, is merely a necessary link in the historical chain of slavery and
scoundrelism. The existence of the Soviet Government is a fact of immeasurable
revolutionary significance. It was necessary to retain it, utilizing the conflict of

the capitalist nations, the as yet unfinished imperialist war, the self-confident
effrontery of the Hohenzollern bands, the thick-wittedness of the
world-bourgeoisie as far as the fundamental questions of the revolution were
concerned, the antagonism of America and Europe, the complication of relations
within the Entente. We had to lead our yet unfinished Soviet ship over the
stormy waves, amid rocks and reefs, completing its building and armament en
route.
Kautsky has the audacity to repeat the accusation that we did not, at the
beginning of 1918, hurl ourselves unarmed against our mighty foe. Had we done
this we would have been crushed.[8] The first great attempt of the proletariat to
seize power would have suffered defeat. The revolutionary wing of the European
proletariat would have been dealt the severest possible blow. The Entente would
have made peace with the Hohenzollern over the corpse of the Russian
Revolution, and the world capitalist reaction would have received a respite for a
number of years. When Kautsky says that, concluding the Brest Peace, we did
not think of its influence on the fate of the German Revolution, he is uttering a
disgraceful slander. We considered the question from all sides, and our sole
criterion was the interests of the international revolution.
[8] The Vienna Arbeiterzeitung opposes, as is fitting, the wise Russian

Communists to the foolish Austrians. "Did not Trotsky," the paper writes, "with
a clear view and understanding of possibilities, sign the Brest-Litovsk peace of
violence, notwithstanding that it served for the consolidation of German
imperialism? The Brest Peace was just as harsh and shameful as is the Versailles
Peace. But does this mean that Trotsky had to be rash enough to continue the
war against Germany? Would not the fate of the Russian Revolution long ago
have been sealed? Trotsky bowed before the unalterable necessity of signing the
shameful treaty in anticipation of the German revolution." The honor of having
foreseen all the consequences of the Brest Peace belongs to Lenin. But this, of
course, alters nothing in the argument of the organ of the Viennese Kautskians.
We came to the conclusion that those interests demanded that the only Soviet
Government in the world should be preserved. And we proved right. Whereas
Kautsky awaited our fall, if not with impatience, at least with certainty; and on
this expected fall built up his whole international policy.
The minutes of the session of the Coalition Government of November 19, 1918,
published by the Bauer Ministry, run:--"First, a continuation of the discussion as
to the relations of Germany and the Soviet Republic. Haase advises a policy of
procrastination. Kautsky agrees with Haase: decision must be postponed. The
Soviet Government will not last long. It will inevitably fall in the course of a few
weeks...."
In this way, at the time when the situation of the Soviet Government was really
extremely difficult--for the destruction of German militarism had given the
Entente, it seemed, the full possibility of finishing with us "in the course of a few
weeks"--at that moment Kautsky not only does not hasten to our aid, and even
does not merely wash his hands of the whole affair; he participates in active
treachery against revolutionary Russia. To aid Scheidemann in his role of
watch-dog of the bourgeoisie, instead of the "programme" role assigned to him
of its "grave-digger," Kautsky himself hastens to become the grave-digger of the
Soviet Government. But the Soviet Government is alive. It will outlive all its
grave-diggers.
PROBLEMS OF THE ORGANIZATION OF LABOR
THE SOVIET GOVERNMENT AND INDUSTRY
If, in the first period of the Soviet revolution, the principal accusation of the
bourgeois world was directed against our savagery and blood-thirstiness, later,
when that argument, from frequent use, had become blunted, and had lost its
force, we were made responsible chiefly for the economic disorganization of the
country. In harmony with his present mission, Kautsky methodically translates
into the language of pseudo-Marxism all the bourgeois charges against the
Soviet Government of destroying the industrial life of Russia. The Bolsheviks
began socialization without a plan. They socialized what was not ready for
socialization. The Russian working class, altogether, is not yet prepared for the
administration of industry; and so on, and so on.
Repeating and combining these accusations, Kautsky, with dull obstinacy, hides
the real cause for our economic disorganization: the imperialist slaughter, the
civil war, and the blockade.
Soviet Russia, from the first months of its existence, found itself deprived of
coal, oil, metal, and cotton. First the Austro-German and then the Entente
imperialisms, with the assistance of the Russian White Guards, tore away from
Soviet Russia the Donetz coal and metal-working region, the oil districts of the
Caucasus, Turkestan with its cotton, Ural with its richest deposits of metals,
Siberia with its bread and meat. The Donetz area had usually supplied our
industry with 94 per cent. of its coal and 74 per cent. of its crude ore. The Ural
supplied the remaining 20 per cent. of the ore and 4 per cent. of the coal. Both
these regions, during the civil war, were cut off from us. We were deprived of
half a milliard poods of coal imported from abroad. Simultaneously, we were left
without oil: the oilfields, one and all, passed into the hands of our enemies. One
needs to have a truly brazen forehead to speak, in face of these facts, of the
destructive influence of "premature," "barbarous," etc., socialization. An
industry which is completely deprived of fuel and raw materials--whether that
industry belongs to a capitalist trust or to the Labor State, whether its factories
be socialized or not--its chimneys will not smoke in either case without coal or
oil. Something might be learned about this, say, in Austria; and for that matter in
Germany itself. A weaving factory administered according to the best Kautskian
methods--if we admit that anything at all can be administered by Kautskian
methods, except one's own inkstand--will not produce prints if it is not supplied
with cotton. And we were simultaneously deprived both of Turkestan and
American cotton. In addition, as has been pointed out, we had no fuel.
Of course, the blockade and the civil war came as the result of the proletarian
revolution in Russia. But it does not at all follow from this that the terrible
devastation caused by the Anglo-American-French blockade and the robber
campaigns of Kolchak and Denikin have to be put down to the discredit of the
Soviet methods of economic organization.
The imperialist war that preceded the revolution, with its all-devouring material
and technical demands, imposed a much greater strain on our young industry
than on the industry of more powerful capitalist countries. Our transport suffered
particularly severely. The exploitation of the railways increased considerably;
the wear and tear correspondingly; while repairs were reduced to a strict
minimum. The inevitable hour of Nemesis was brought nearer by the fuel crisis.
Our almost simultaneous loss of the Donetz coal, foreign coal, and the oil of the
Caucasus, obliged us in the sphere of transport to have recourse to wood. And,
as the supplies of wood fuel were not in the least calculated with a view to this,
we had to stoke our boilers with recently stored raw wood, which has an
extremely destructive effect on the mechanism of locomotives that are already
worn out. We see, in consequence, that the chief reasons for the collapse of
transport preceded November, 1917. But even those reasons which are directly
or indirectly bound up with the November Revolution fall under the heading of
political consequences of the revolution; and in no circumstances do they affect
Socialist economic methods.
The influence of political disturbances in the economic sphere was not limited
only to questions of transport and fuel. If world industry, during the last decade,
was more and more becoming a single organism, the more directly does this
apply to national industry. On the other hand, the war and the revolution were
mechanically breaking up and tearing asunder Russian industry in every
direction. The industrial ruin of Poland, the Baltic fringe, and later of Petrograd,
began under Tsarism and continued under Kerensky, embracing ever new and
newer regions. Endless evacuations simultaneous with the destruction of
industry, of necessity meant the destruction of transport also. During the civil
war, with its changing fronts, evacuations assumed a more feverish and
consequently a still more destructive character. Each side temporarily or
permanently evacuated this or that industrial centre, and took all possible steps
to ensure that the most important industrial enterprises could not be utilized by
the enemy: all valuable machines were carried off, or at any rate their most
delicate parts, together with the technical and best workers. The evacuation was
followed by a re-evacuation, which not infrequently completed the destruction
both of the property transferred and of the railways. Some most important
industrial areas--especially in the Ukraine and in the Urals--changed hands
several times.
To this it must be added that, at the time when the destruction of technical
equipment was being accomplished on an unprecedented scale, the supply of
machines from abroad, which hitherto played a decisive part in our industry, had
completely ceased.
But not only did the dead elements of production--buildings, machines, rails,
fuel, and raw material--suffer terrible losses under the combined blows of the
war and the revolution. Not less, if not more, did the chief factor of industry, its
living creative force--the proletariat--suffer. The proletariat was consolidating
the November revolution, building and defending the apparatus of Soviet power,
and carrying on a ceaseless struggle with the White Guards. The skilled workers
are, as a rule, at the same time the most advanced. The civil war tore away many
tens of thousands of the best workers for a long time from productive labor,
swallowing up many thousands of them for ever. The Socialist revolution placed
the chief burden of its sacrifices upon the proletarian vanguard, and
consequently on industry.
All the attention of the Soviet State has been directed, for the two and a half
years of its existence, to the problem of military defence. The best forces and its
principal resources were given to the front.
In any case, the class struggle inflicts blows upon industry. That accusation, long
before Kautsky, was levelled at it by all the philosophers of the social harmony.
During simple economic strikes the workers consume, and do not produce. Still
more powerful, therefore, are the blows inflicted upon economic life by the class
struggle in its severest form--in the form of armed conflicts. But it is quite clear
that the civil war cannot be classified under the heading of Socialist economic
methods.
The reasons enumerated above are more than sufficient to explain the difficult
economic situation of Soviet Russia. There is no fuel, there is no metal, there is
no cotton, transport is destroyed, technical equipment is in disorder, living
labor-power is scattered over the face of the country, and a high percentage of it
has been lost to the front--is there any need to seek supplementary reasons in the
economic Utopianism of the Bolsheviks in order to explain the fall of our
industry? On the contrary, each of the reasons quoted alone is sufficient to evoke
the question: how is it possible at all that, under such conditions, factories and
workshops should continue to function?
And yet they do continue principally in the shape of war industry, which is at
present living at the expense of the rest. The Soviet Government was obliged to
re-create it, just like the army, out of fragments. War industry, set up again under
these conditions of unprecedented difficulty, has fulfilled and is fulfilling its
duty: the Red Army is clothed, shod, equipped with its rifle, its machine gun, its
cannon, its bullet, its shell, its aeroplane, and all else that it requires.
As soon as the dawn of peace made its appearance--after the destruction of

Kolchak, Yudenich, and Denikin--we placed before ourselves the problem of
economic organization in the fullest possible way. And already, in the course of
three or four months of intensive work in this sphere, it has become clear beyond
all possibility of doubt that, thanks to its most intimate connection with the
popular masses, the elasticity of its apparatus, and its own revolutionary
initiative, the Soviet Government disposes of such resources and methods for
economic reconstruction as no other government ever had or has to-day.
True, before us there arose quite new questions and new difficulties in the sphere
of the organization of labor. Socialist theory had no answers to these questions,
and could not have them. We had to find the solution in practice, and test it in
practice. Kautskianism is a whole epoch behind the gigantic economic problems
being solved at present by the Soviet Government. In the form of Menshevism, it
constantly throws obstacles in our way, opposing the practical measures of our
economic reconstruction by bourgeois prejudices and bureaucratic-intellectual
scepticism.
To introduce the reader to the very essence of the questions of the organization
of labor, as they stand at present before us, we quote below the report of the
author of this book at the Third All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions. With the
object of the fullest possible elucidation of the question, the text of the speech is
supplemented by considerable extracts from the author's reports at the
All-Russian Congress of Economic Councils and at the Ninth Congress of the
Communist Party.
REPORT ON THE ORGANIZATION OF LABOR
Comrades, the internal civil war is coming to an end. On the western front, the
situation remains undecided. It is possible that the Polish bourgeoisie will hurl a
challenge at its fate.... But even in this case--we do not seek it--the war will not
demand of us that all-devouring concentration of forces which the simultaneous
struggle on four fronts imposed upon us. The frightful pressure of the war is
becoming weaker. Economic requirements and problems are more and more
coming to the fore. History is bringing us, along the whole line, to our
fundamental problem--the organization of labor on new social foundations. The
organization of labor is in its essence the organization of the new society: every
historical form of society is in its foundation a form of organization of labor.
While every previous form of society was an organization of labor in the
interests of a minority, which organized its State apparatus for the oppression of
the overwhelming majority of the workers, we are making the first attempt in
world history to organize labor in the interests of the laboring majority itself.
This, however, does not exclude the element of compulsion in all its forms, both
the most gentle and the extremely severe. The element of State compulsion not
only does not disappear from the historical arena, but on the contrary will still
play, for a considerable period, an extremely prominent part.
As a general rule, man strives to avoid labor. Love for work is not at all an
inborn characteristic: it is created by economic pressure and social education.
One may even say that man is a fairly lazy animal. It is on this quality, in reality,
that is founded to a considerable extent all human progress; because if man did
not strive to expend his energy economically, did not seek to receive the largest
possible quantity of products in return for a small quantity of energy, there
would have been no technical development or social culture. It would appear,
then, from this point of view that human laziness is a progressive force, Old
Antonio Labriola, the Italian Marxist, even used to picture the man of the future
as a "happy and lazy genius." We must not, however, draw the conclusion from
this that the party and the trade unions must propagate this quality in their
agitation as a moral duty. No, no! We have sufficient of it as it is. The problem
before the social organization is just to bring "laziness" within a definite
framework, to discipline it, and to pull mankind together with the help of
methods and measures invented by mankind itself.
COMPULSORY LABOR SERVICE
The key to economic organization is labor-power, skilled, elementarily trained,

semi-trained, untrained, or unskilled. To work out methods for its accurate
registration, mobilization, distribution, productive application, means practically
to solve the problem of economic construction. This is a problem for a whole
epoch--a gigantic problem. Its difficulty is intensified by the fact that we have to
reconstruct labor on Socialist foundations in conditions of hitherto unknown
poverty and terrifying misery.
The more our machine equipment is worn out, the more disordered our railways
grow, the less hope there is for us of receiving machines to any significant extent
from abroad in the near future, the greater is the importance acquired by the
question of living labor-power. At first sight it would seem that there is plenty of
it. But how are we to get at it? How are we to apply it? How are we productively
to organize it? Even with the cleaning of snow drifts from the railway tracks, we
were brought face to face with very big difficulties. It was absolutely impossible
to meet those difficulties by means of buying labor-power on the market, with
the present insignificant purchasing power of money, and in the most complete
absence of manufactured products. Our fuel requirements cannot be satisfied,
even partially, without a mass application, on a scale hitherto unknown, of
labor-power to work on wood, fuel, peat, and combustible slate. The civil war
has played havoc with our railways, our bridges, our buildings, our stations. We
require at once tens and hundreds of thousands of hands to restore order to all
this. For production on a large scale in our timber, peat, and other enterprises, we
require housing for our workers, if they be only temporary huts. Hence, again,
the necessity of devoting a considerable amount of labor-power to building
work. Many workers are required to organize river navigation; and so on, and so
forth....
Capitalist industry utilizes auxiliary labor-power on a large scale, in the shape of

peasants employed on industry for only part of the year. The village, throttled by
the grip of landlessness, always threw a certain surplus of labor-power on to the
market. The State obliged it to do this by its demand for taxes. The market
offered the peasant manufactured goods. To-day, we have none of this. The
village has acquired more land; there is not sufficient agricultural machinery;
workers are required for the land; industry can at present give practically nothing
to the village; and the market no longer has an attractive influence on
labor-power.
Yet labor-power is required--required more than at any time before. Not only the
worker, but the peasant also, must give to the Soviet State his energy, in order to
ensure that laboring Russia, and with it the laboring masses, should not be
crushed. The only way to attract the labor-power necessary for our economic
problems is to introduce compulsory labor service.
The very principle of compulsory labor service is for the Communist quite
unquestionable. "He who works not, neither shall he eat." And as all must eat, all
are obliged to work. Compulsory labor service is sketched in our Constitution
and in our Labor Code. But hitherto it has always remained a mere principle. Its
application has always had an accidental, impartial, episodic character. Only
now, when along the whole line we have reached the question of the economic
rebirth of the country, have problems of compulsory labor service arisen before
us in the most concrete way possible. The only solution of economic difficulties
that is correct from the point of view both of principle and of practice is to treat
the population of the whole country as the reservoir of the necessary
labor-power--an almost inexhaustible reservoir--and to introduce strict order into
the work of its registration, mobilization, and utilization.
How are we practically to begin the utilization of labor-power on the basis of

compulsory military service?
Hitherto only the War Department has had any experience in the sphere of the
registration, mobilization, formation, and transference from one place to another
of large masses. These technical methods and principles were inherited by our
War Department, to a considerable extent, from the past.
In the economic sphere there is no such heritage; since in that sphere there
existed the principle of private property, and labor-power entered each factory
separately from the market. It is consequently natural that we should be obliged,
at any rate during the first period, to make use of the apparatus of the War
Department on a large scale for labor mobilizations.
We have set up special organizations for the application of the principle of

compulsory labor service in the centre and in the districts: in the provinces, the
counties, and the rural districts, we have already compulsory labor committees at
work. They rely for the most part on the central and local organs of the War
Department. Our economic centres--the Supreme Economic Council, the
People's Commissariat for Agriculture, the People's Commissariat for Ways and
Communications, the People's Commissariat for Food--work out estimates of the
labor-power they require. The Chief Committee for Compulsory Labor Service
receives these estimates, co-ordinates them, brings them into agreement with the
local resources of labor-power, gives corresponding directions to its local
organs, and through them carries out labor mobilizations. Within the boundaries
of regions, provinces, and counties, the local bodies carry out this work
independently, with the object of satisfying local economic requirements.
All this organization is at present only in the embryo stage. It is still very
imperfect. But the course we have adopted is unquestionably the right one.
If the organization of the new society can be reduced fundamentally to the

reorganization of labor, the organization of labor signifies in its turn the correct
introduction of general labor service. This problem is in no way met by measures
of a purely departmental and administrative character. It touches the very
foundations of economic life and the social structure. It finds itself in conflict
with the most powerful psychological habits and prejudices. The introduction of
compulsory labor service pre-supposes, on the one hand, a colossal work of
education, and, on the other, the greatest possible care in the practical method
adopted.
The utilization of labor-power must be to the last degree economical. In our

labor mobilizations we have to reckon with the economic and social conditions
of every region, and with the requirements of the principal occupation of the
local population--i.e., of agriculture. We have, if possible, to make use of the
previous auxiliary occupations and part-time industries of the local population.
We have to see that the transference of mobilized labor-power should take place
over the shortest possible distances--i.e., to the nearest sectors of the labor front.
We must see that the number of workers mobilized correspond to the breadth of
our economic problem. We must see that the workers mobilized be supplied in
good time with the necessary implements of production, and with food. We must
see that at their head be placed experienced and business-like instructors. We
must see that the workers mobilized become convinced on the spot that their
labor-power is being made use of cautiously and economically and is not being
expended haphazard. Wherever it is possible, direct mobilization must be
replaced by the labor task--i.e., by the imposition on the rural district of an
obligation to supply, for example, in such a time such a number of cubic sazhens
of wood, or to bring up by carting to such a station so many poods of cast-iron,
etc. In this sphere, it is essential to study experience as it accumulates with
particular care, to allow a great measure of elasticity to the economic apparatus,
to show more attention to local interests and social peculiarities of tradition. In a
word, we have to complete, ameliorate, perfect, the system, methods, and organs
for the mobilization of labor-power. But at the same time it is necessary once for
all to make clear to ourselves that the principle itself of compulsory labor service
has just so radically and permanently replaced the principle of free hiring as the
socialization of the means of production has replaced capitalist property.
THE MILITARIZATION OF LABOR

The introduction of compulsory labor service is unthinkable without the

application, to a greater or less degree, of the methods of militarization of labor.
This term at once brings us into the region of the greatest possible superstitions
and outcries from the opposition.
To understand what militarization of labor in the Workers' State means, and

what its methods are, one has to make clear to oneself in what way the army
itself was militarized--for, as we all know, in its first days the army did not at all
possess the necessary "military" qualities. During these two years we mobilized
for the Red Army nearly as many soldiers as there are members in our trade
unions. But the members of the trade unions are workers, while in the army the
workers constitute about 15 per cent., the remainder being a peasant mass. And,
none the less, we can have no doubt that the true builder and "militarizer" of the
Red Army has been the foremost worker, pushed forward by the party and the
trade union organization. Whenever the situation at the front was difficult,
whenever the recently-mobilized peasant mass did not display sufficient
stability, we turned on the one hand to the Central Committee of the Communist
Party, and on the other to the All-Russian Council of Trade Unions. From both
these sources the foremost workers were sent to the front, and there built the Red
Army after their own likeness and image--educating, hardening, and militarizing
the peasant mass.
This fact must be kept in mind to-day with all possible clearness because it
throws the best possible light on the meaning of militarization in the workers'
and peasants' State. The militarization of labor has more than once been put
forward as a watchword and realized in separate branches of economic life in the
bourgeois countries, both in the West and in Russia under Tsarism. But our
militarization is distinguished from those experiments by its aims and methods,
just as much as the class-conscious proletariat organized for emancipation is
distinguished from the class-conscious bourgeoisie organized for exploitation.
From the confusion, semi-unconscious and semi-deliberate, of two different

historical forms of militarization--the proletarian or Socialist and the
bourgeois--there spring the greater part of the prejudices, mistakes, protests, and
outcries on this subject. It is on such a confusion of meanings that the whole
position of the Mensheviks, our Russian Kautskies, is founded, as it was
expressed in their theoretical resolution moved at the present Congress of Trade
Unions.
The Mensheviks attacked not only the militarization of labor, but general labor
service also. They reject these methods as "compulsory." They preach that
general labor service means a low productivity of labor, while militarization
means senseless scattering of labor-power.
"Compulsory labor always is unproductive labor,"--such is the exact phrase in

the Menshevik resolution. This affirmation brings us right up to the very essence
of the question. For, as we see, the question is not at all whether it is wise or
unwise to proclaim this or that factory militarized, or whether it is helpful or
otherwise to give the military revolutionary tribunal powers to punish corrupt
workers who steal materials and instruments, so precious to us, or who sabotage
their work. No, the Mensheviks have gone much further into the question.
Affirming that compulsory labor is always unproductive, they thereby attempt to
cut the ground from under the feet of our economic reconstruction in the present
transitional epoch. For it is beyond question that to step from bourgeois anarchy
to Socialist economy without a revolutionary dictatorship, and without
compulsory forms of economic organization, is impossible.
In the first paragraph of the Menshevik resolution we are told that we are living
in the period of transition from the capitalist method of production to the
Socialist. What does this mean? And, first of all, whence does this come? Since
what time has this been admitted by our Kautskians? They accused us--and this
formed the foundation of our differences--of Socialist Utopianism; they
declared--and this constituted the essence of their political teaching--that there
can be no talk about the transition to Socialism in our epoch, and that our
revolution is a bourgeois revolution, and that we Communists are only
destroying capitalist economy, and that we are not leading the country forward
but are throwing it back. This was the root difference--the most profound, the
most irreconcilable--from which all the others followed. Now the Mensheviks
tell us incidentally, in the introductory paragraph of their resolution, as
something that does not require proof, that we are in the period of transition
from capitalism to Socialism. And this quite unexpected admission, which, one
might think, is extremely like a complete capitulation, is made the more lightly
and carelessly that, as the whole resolution shows, it imposes no revolutionary
obligations on the Mensheviks. They remain entirely captive to the bourgeois
ideology. After recognizing that we are on the road to Socialism, the Mensheviks
with all the greater ferocity attack those methods without which, in the harsh and
difficult conditions of the present day, the transition to Socialism cannot be
accomplished.
Compulsory labor, we are told, is always unproductive. We ask what does

compulsory labor mean here, that is, to what kind of labor is it opposed?
Obviously, to free labor. What are we to understand, in that case, by free labor?
That phrase was formulated by the progressive philosophers of the bourgeoisie,
in the struggle against unfree, i.e., against the serf labor of peasants, and against
the standardized and regulated labor of the craft guilds. Free labor meant labor
which might be "freely" bought in the market; freedom was reduced to a legal
fiction, on the basis of freely-hired slavery. We know of no other form of free
labor in history. Let the very few representatives of the Mensheviks at this
Congress explain to us what they mean by free, non-compulsory labor, if not the
market of labor-power.
History has known slave labor. History has known serf labor. History has known
the regulated labor of the mediæval craft guilds. Throughout the world there now
prevails hired labor, which the yellow journalists of all countries oppose, as the
highest possible form of liberty, to Soviet "slavery." We, on the other hand,
oppose capitalist slavery by socially-regulated labor on the basis of an economic
plan, obligatory for the whole people and consequently compulsory for each
worker in the country. Without this we cannot even dream of a transition to
Socialism. The element of material, physical, compulsion may be greater or less;
that depends on many conditions--on the degree of wealth or poverty of the
country, on the heritage of the past, on the general level of culture, on the
condition of transport, on the administrative apparatus, etc., etc. But obligation,
and, consequently, compulsion, are essential conditions in order to bind down
the bourgeois anarchy, to secure socialization of the means of production and
labor, and to reconstruct economic life on the basis of a single plan.
For the Liberal, freedom in the long run means the market. Can or cannot the
capitalist buy labor-power at a moderate price--that is for him the sole measure
of the freedom of labor. That measure is false, not only in relation to the future
but also in connection with the past.
It would be absurd to imagine that, during the time of bondage-right, work was
carried entirely under the stick of physical compulsion, as if an overseer stood
with a whip behind the back of every peasant. Mediæval forms of economic life
grew up out of definite conditions of production, and created definite forms of
social life, with which the peasant grew accustomed, and which he at certain
periods considered just, or at any rate unalterable. Whenever he, under the
influence of a change in material conditions, displayed hostility, the State
descended upon him with its material force, thereby displaying the compulsory
character of the organization of labor.
The foundations of the militarization of labor are those forms of State

compulsion without which the replacement of capitalist economy by the
Socialist will for ever remain an empty sound. Why do we speak of
militarization? Of course, this is only an analogy--but an analogy very rich in
content. No social organization except the army has ever considered itself
justified in subordinating citizens to itself in such a measure, and to control them
by its will on all sides to such a degree, as the State of the proletarian
dictatorship considers itself justified in doing, and does. Only the army--just
because in its way it used to decide questions of the life or death of nations,
States, and ruling classes--was endowed with powers of demanding from each
and all complete submission to its problems, aims, regulations, and orders. And
it achieved this to the greater degree, the more the problems of military
organization coincided with the requirements of social development.
The question of the life or death of Soviet Russia is at present being settled on
the labor front; our economic, and together with them our professional and
productive organizations, have the right to demand from their members all that
devotion, discipline, and executive thoroughness, which hitherto only the army
required.
On the other hand, the relation of the capitalist to the worker, is not at all
founded merely on the "free" contract, but includes the very powerful elements
of State regulation and material compulsion.
The competition of capitalist with capitalist imparted a certain very limited

reality to the fiction of freedom of labor; but this competition, reduced to a
minimum by trusts and syndicates, we have finally eliminated by destroying
private property in the means of production. The transition to Socialism, verbally
acknowledged by the Mensheviks, means the transition from anarchical
distribution of labor-power--by means of the game of buying and selling, the
movement of market prices and wages--to systematic distribution of the workers
by the economic organizations of the county, the province, and the whole
country. Such a form of planned distribution pre-supposes the subordination of

those distributed to the economic plan of the State. And this is the essence of
compulsory labor service, which inevitably enters into the programme of the
Socialist organization of labor, as its fundamental element.
If organized economic life is unthinkable without compulsory labor service, the

latter is not to be realized without the abolition of fiction of the freedom of labor,
and without the substitution for it of the obligatory principle, which is
supplemented by real compulsion.
That free labor is more productive than compulsory labor is quite true when it
refers to the period of transition from feudal society to bourgeois society. But
one needs to be a Liberal or--at the present day--a Kautskian, to make that truth
permanent, and to transfer its application to the period of transition from the
bourgeois to the Socialist order. If it were true that compulsory labor is
unproductive always and under every condition, as the Menshevik resolution
says, all our constructive work would be doomed to failure. For we can have no
way to Socialism except by the authoritative regulation of the economic forces
and resources of the country, and the centralized distribution of labor-power in
harmony with the general State plan. The Labor State considers itself
empowered to send every worker to the place where his work is necessary. And
not one serious Socialist will begin to deny to the Labor State the right to lay its
hand upon the worker who refuses to execute his labor duty. But the whole point
is that the Menshevik path of transition to "Socialism" is a milky way, without
the bread monopoly, without the abolition of the market, without the
revolutionary dictatorship, and without the militarization of labor.
Without general labor service, without the right to order and demand fulfilment
of orders, the trade unions will be transformed into a mere form without a
reality; for the young Socialist State requires trade unions, not for a struggle for
better conditions of labor--that is the task of the social and State organizations as
a whole--but to organize the working class for the ends of production, to
educate, discipline, distribute, group, retain certain categories and certain
workers at their posts for fixed periods--in a word, hand in hand with the State to
exercise their authority in order to lead the workers into the framework of a
single economic plan. To defend, under such conditions, the "freedom" of labor
means to defend fruitless, helpless, absolutely unregulated searches for better
conditions, unsystematic, chaotic changes from factory to factory, in a hungry
country, in conditions of terrible disorganization of the transport and food

apparatus.... What except the complete collapse of the working-class and
complete economic anarchy could be the result of the stupid attempt to reconcile
bourgeois freedom of labor with proletarian socialization of the means of
production?
Consequently, comrades, militarization of labor, in the root sense indicated by

me, is not the invention of individual politicians or an invention of our War
Department, but represents the inevitable method of organization and
disciplining of labor-power during the period of transition from capitalism to
Socialism. And if the compulsory distribution of labor-power, its brief or
prolonged retention at particular industries and factories, its regulation within the
framework of the general State economic plan--if these forms of compulsion
lead always and everywhere, as the Menshevik resolution states, to the lowering
of productivity, then you can erect a monument over the grave of Socialism. For
we cannot build Socialism on decreased production. Every social organization is
in its foundation an organization of labor, and if our new organization of labor
leads to a lowering of its productivity, it thereby most fatally leads to the
destruction of the Socialist society we are building, whichever way we twist and
turn, whatever measures of salvation we invent.
That is why I stated at the very beginning that the Menshevik argument against
militarization leads us to the root question of general labor service and its
influence on the productivity of labor. It is true that compulsory labor is always
unproductive? We have to reply that that is the most pitiful and worthless
Liberal prejudice. The whole question is: who applies the principle of
compulsion, over whom, and for what purpose? What State, what class, in what
conditions, by what methods? Even the serf organization was in certain
conditions a step forward, and led to the increase in the productivity of labor.
Production has grown extremely under capitalism, that is, in the epoch of the
free buying and selling of labor-power on the market. But free labor, together
with the whole of capitalism, entered the stage of imperialism and blew itself up
in the imperialist war. The whole economic life of the world entered a period of
bloody anarchy, monstrous perturbations, the impoverishment, dying out, and
destruction of masses of the people. Can we, under such conditions, talk about
the productivity of free labor, when the fruits of that labor are destroyed ten
times more quickly than they are created? The imperialistic war, and that which
followed it, displayed the impossibility of society existing any longer on the
foundation of free labor. Or perhaps someone possesses the secret of how to

separate free labor from the delirium tremens of imperialism, that is, of turning
back the clock of social development half a century or a century?
If it were to turn out that the planned, and consequently compulsory,

organization of labor which is arising to replace imperialism led to the lowering
of economic life, it would mean the destruction of all our culture, and a
retrograde movement of humanity back to barbarism and savagery.
Happily, not only for Soviet Russia but for the whole of humanity, the
philosophy of the low productivity of compulsory labor--"everywhere and under
all conditions"--is only a belated echo of ancient Liberal melodies. The
productivity of labor is the total productive meaning of the most complex
combination of social conditions, and is not in the least measured or
pre-determined by the legal form of labor.
The whole of human history is the history of the organization and education of
collective man for labor, with the object of attaining a higher level of
productivity. Man, as I have already permitted myself to point out, is lazy; that
is, he instinctively strives to receive the largest possible quantity of products for
the least possible expenditure of energy. Without such a striving, there would
have been no economic development. The growth of civilization is measured by
the productivity of human labor, and each new form of social relations must pass
through a test on such lines.
"Free," that is, freely-hired labor, did not appear all at once upon the world, with
all the attributes of productivity. It acquired a high level of productivity only
gradually, as a result of a prolonged application of methods of labor organization
and labor education. Into that education there entered the most varying methods
and practices, which in addition changed from one epoch to another. First of all
the bourgeoisie drove the peasant from the village to the high road with its club,
having preliminarily robbed him of his land, and when he would not work in the
factory it branded his forehead with red-hot irons, hung him, sent him to the
gallows; and in the long run it taught the tramp who had been shaken out of his
village to stand at the lathe in the factory. At this stage, as we see, "free" labor is
little different as yet from convict labor, both in its material conditions and in its
legal aspect.
At different times the bourgeoisie combined the red-hot irons of repression in

different proportions with methods of moral influence, and, first of all, the
teaching of the priest. As early as the sixteenth century, it reformed the old
religion of Catholicism, which defended the feudal order, and adapted for itself a
new religion in the form of the Reformation, which combined the free soul with
free trade and free labor. It found for itself new priests, who became the spiritual
shop-assistants, pious counter-jumpers of the bourgeoisie. The school, the press,
the market-place, and parliament were adapted by the bourgeoisie for the moral
fashioning of the working-class. Different forms of wages--day-wages, piece
wages, contract and collective bargaining--all these are merely changing
methods in the hands of the bourgeoisie for the labor mobilization of the
proletariat. To this there are added all sorts of forms for encouraging labor and
exciting ambition. Finally, the bourgeoisie learned how to gain possession even
of the trade unions--i.e., the organizations of the working class itself; and it made
use of them on a large scale, particularly in Great Britain, to discipline the
workers. It domesticated the leaders, and with their help inoculated the workers
with the fiction of the necessity for peaceful organic labor, for a faultless attitude
to their duties, and for a strict execution of the laws of the bourgeois State. The
crown of all this work is Taylorism, in which the elements of the scientific
organization of the process of production are combined with the most
concentrated methods of the system of sweating.
From all that has been said above, it is clear that the productivity of freely-hired
labor is not something that appeared all at once, perfected, presented by history
on a salver. No, it was the result of a long and stubborn policy of repression,
education, organization, and encouragement, applied by the bourgeoisie in its
relations with the working class. Step by step it learned to squeeze out of the
workers ever more and more of the products of labor; and one of the most
powerful weapons in its hand turned out to be the proclamation of free hiring as
the sole free, normal, healthy, productive, and saving form of labor.
A legal form of labor which would of its own virtue guarantee its productivity
has not been known in history, and cannot be known. The legal superstructure of
labor corresponds to the relations and current ideas of the epoch. The
productivity of labor is developed, on the basis of the development of technical
forces, by labor education, by the gradual adaptation of the workers to the
changed methods of production and the new form of social relations.
The creation of Socialist society means the organization of the workers on new
foundations, their adaptation to those foundations, and their labor re-education,
with the one unchanging end of the increase in the productivity of labor. The
working class, under the leadership of its vanguard, must itself re-educate itself
on the foundations of Socialism. Whoever has not understood this is ignorant of
the A B C of Socialist construction.
What methods have we, then, for the re-education of the workers? Infinitely
wider than the bourgeoisie has--and, in addition, honest, direct, open methods,
infected neither by hypocrisy nor by lies. The bourgeoisie had to have recourse
to deception, representing its labor as free, when in reality it was not merely
socially-imposed, but actually slave labor. For it was the labor of the majority in
the interests of the minority. We, on the other hand, organize labor in the
interests of the workers themselves, and therefore we can have no motives for
hiding or masking the socially compulsory character of our labor organization.
We need the fairy stories neither of the priests, nor of the Liberals, nor of the
Kautskians. We say directly and openly to the masses that they can save, rebuild,
and bring to a flourishing condition a Socialist country only by means of hard
work, unquestioning discipline and exactness in execution on the part of every
worker.
The chief of our resources is moral influence--propaganda not only in word but
in deed. General labor service has an obligatory character; but this does not
mean at all that it represents violence done to the working class. If compulsory
labor came up against the opposition of the majority of the workers it would turn
out a broken reed, and with it the whole of the Soviet order. The militarization of
labor, when the workers are opposed to it, is the State slavery of Arakcheyev.
The militarization of labor by the will of the workers themselves is the Socialist
dictatorship. That compulsory labor service and the militarization of labor do not
force the will of the workers, as "free" labor used to do, is best shown by the
flourishing, unprecedented in the history of humanity, of labor voluntarism in
the form of "Subbotniks" (Communist Saturdays). Such a phenomenon there
never was before, anywhere or at any time. By their own voluntary labor, freely
given--once a week and oftener--the workers clearly demonstrate not only their
readiness to bear the yoke of "compulsory" labor but their eagerness to give the
State besides that a certain quantity of additional labor. The "Subbotniks" are not
only a splendid demonstration of Communist solidarity, but also the best
possible guarantee for the successful introduction of general labor service. Such
truly Communist tendencies must be shown up in their true light, extended, and
developed with the help of propaganda.
The chief spiritual weapon of the bourgeoisie is religion; ours is the open
explanation to the masses of the exact position of things, the extension of
scientific and technical knowledge, and the initiation of the masses into the
general economic plan of the State, on the basis of which there must be brought
to bear all the labor-power at the disposal of the Soviet regime.
Political economy provided us with the principal substance of our agitation in

the period we have just left: the capitalist social order was a riddle, and we
explained that riddle to the masses. To-day, social riddles are explained to the
masses by the very mechanism of the Soviet order, which draws the masses into
all branches of administration. Political economy will more and more pass into
the realms of history. There move forward into the foreground the sciences
which study nature and the methods of subordinating it to man.
The trade unions must organize scientific and technical educational work on the
widest possible scale, so that every worker in his own branch of industry should
find the impulses for theoretical work of the brain, while the latter should again
return him to labor, perfecting it and making him more productive. The press as
a whole must fall into line with the economic problems of the country--not in
that sense alone in which this is being done at present--i.e., not in the sense of a
mere general agitation in favor of a revival of labor--but in the sense of the
discussion and the weighing of concrete economic problems and plans, ways and
means of their solution, and, most important of all, the testing and criticism of
results already achieved. The newspapers must from day to day follow the
production of the most important factories and other enterprises, registering their
successes and failures encouraging some and pillorying others....
Russian capitalism, in consequence of its lateness, its lack of independence, and

its resulting parasitic features, has had much less time than European capitalism
technically to educate the laboring masses, to train and discipline them for
production. That problem is now in its entirety imposed upon the industrial
organizations of the proletariat. A good engineer, a good mechanic, and a good
carpenter, must have in the Soviet Republic the same publicity and fame as
hitherto was enjoyed by prominent agitators, revolutionary fighters, and, in the
most recent period, the most courageous and capable commanders and
commissaries. Greater and lesser leaders of technical development must occupy

the central position in the public eye. Bad workers must be made ashamed of
doing their work badly.
We still retain, and for a long time will retain, the system of wages. The further
we go, the more will its importance become simply to guarantee to all members
of society all the necessaries of life; and thereby it will cease to be a system of
wages. But at present we are not sufficiently rich for this. Our main problem is
to raise the quantity of products turned out, and to this problem all the remainder
must be subordinated. In the present difficult period the system of wages is for
us, first and foremost, not a method for guaranteeing the personal existence of
any separate worker, but a method of estimating what that individual worker
brings by his labor to the Labor Republic.
Consequently, wages, in the form both of money and of goods, must be brought
into the closest possible touch with the productivity of individual labor. Under
capitalism, the system of piece-work and of grading, the application of the
Taylor system, etc., have as their object to increase the exploitation of the
workers by the squeezing-out of surplus value. Under Socialist production,
piece-work, bonuses, etc., have as their problem to increase the volume of social
product, and consequently to raise the general well-being. Those workers who
do more for the general interest than others receive the right to a greater quantity
of the social product than the lazy, the careless, and the disorganizers.
Finally, when it rewards some, the Labor State cannot but punish others--those
who are clearly infringing labor solidarity, undermining the common work, and
seriously impairing the Socialist renaissance of the country. Repression for the
attainment of economic ends is a necessary weapon of the Socialist dictatorship.
All the measures enumerated above--and together with them a number of

others--must assist the development of rivalry in the sphere of production.
Without this we shall never rise above the average, which is a very
unsatisfactory level. At the bottom of rivalry lies the vital instinct--the struggle
for existence--which in the bourgeois order assumes the character of
competition. Rivalry will not disappear even in the developed Socialist society;
but with the growing guarantee of the necessary requirements of life rivalry will
acquire an ever less selfish and purely idealist character. It will express itself in a
striving to perform the greatest possible service for one's village, county, town,
or the whole of society, and to receive in return renown, gratitude, sympathy, or,
finally, just internal satisfaction from the consciousness of work well done. But
in the difficult period of transition, in conditions of the extreme shortage of
material goods, and the as yet insufficiently developed state of social solidarity,
rivalry must inevitably be to a greater or less degree bound up with a striving to
guarantee for oneself one's own requirements.
This, comrades, is the sum of resources at the disposal of the Labor State in
order to raise the productivity of labor. As we see, there is no ready-made
solution here. We shall find it written in no book. For there could not be such a
book. We are now only beginning, together with you, to write that book in the
sweat and the blood of the workers. We say: working men and women, you have
crossed to the path of regulated labor. Only along that road will you build the
Socialist society. Before you there lies a problem which no one will settle for
you: the problem of increasing production on new social foundations. Unless
you solve that problem, you will perish. If you solve it, you will raise humanity
by a whole head.
LABOR ARMIES
The question of the application of armies to labor purposes, which has acquired
amongst us an enormous importance from the point of view of principle, was
approached by us by the path of practice, not at all on the foundations of
theoretical consideration. On certain borders of Soviet Russia, circumstances had
arisen which had left considerable military forces free for an indefinite period.
To transfer them to other active fronts, especially in the winter, was difficult in
consequence of the disorder of railway transport. Such, for example, proved the
position of the Third Army, distributed over the provinces of the Ural and the
Ural area. The leading workers of that army, understanding that as yet it could
not be demobilized, themselves raised the question of its transference to labor
work. They sent to the centre a more or less worked-out draft decree for a labor
army.
The problem was novel and difficult. Would the Red soldiers work? Would their
work be sufficiently productive? Would it pay for itself? In this connection there
were doubts even in our own ranks. Needless to say, the Mensheviks struck up a
chorus of opposition. The same Abramovich, at the Congress of Economic
Councils called in January or the beginning of February--that is to say, when the
whole affair was still in draft stage--foretold that we should suffer an inevitable
failure, for the whole undertaking was senseless, an Arakcheyev Utopia, etc.,
etc. We considered the matter otherwise. Of course the difficulties were great,
but they were not distinguishable in principle from many other difficulties of
Soviet constructive work.
Let us consider in fact what was the organism of the Third Army. Taken all in
all, one rifle division and one cavalry division--a total of fifteen regiments--and,
in addition, special units. The remaining military formations had already been
transformed to other armies and fronts. But the apparatus of military
administration had remained untouched as yet, and we considered it probable
that in the spring we should have to transfer it along the Volga to the Caucasus
front, against Denikin, if by that time he were not finally broken. On the whole,
in the Third Army there remained about 120,000 Red soldiers in administrative
posts, institutions, military units, hospitals, etc. In this general mass, mainly
peasant in its composition, there were reckoned about 16,000 Communists and
members of the organization of sympathizers--to a considerable extent workers
of the Ural. In this way, in its composition and structure, the Third Army
represented a peasant mass bound together into a military organization under the
leadership of the foremost workers. In the army there worked a considerable
number of military specialists, who carried out important military functions
while remaining under the general control of the Communists. If we consider the
Third Army from this general point of view, we shall see that it represents in
miniature the whole of Soviet Russia. Whether we take the Red Army as a
whole, or the organization of the Soviet regime in the county, province, or the
whole Republic, including the economic organs, we shall find everywhere the
same scheme of organization: millions of peasants drawn into new forms of
political, economic, and social life by the organized workers, who occupy a
controlling position in all spheres of Soviet construction. To posts requiring
special knowledge, we send experts of the bourgeois school. They are given the
necessary independence, but control over their work remains in the hands of the
working class, in the person of its Communist Party. The introduction of general
labor service is again only conceivable for us as the mobilization of mainly
peasant labor-power under the guidance of the most advanced workers. In this
way there were not, and could not, be any obstacles in principle in the way of
application of the army to labor. In other words, the opposition in principle to
labor armies, on the part of those same Mensheviks, was in reality opposition to
"compulsory" labor generally, and consequently against general labor service
and against Soviet methods of economic reconstruction as a whole. This

opposition did not trouble us a great deal.
Naturally, the military apparatus as such is not adapted directly to the process of
labor. But we had no illusions about that. Control had to remain in the hands of
the appropriate economic organs; the army supplied the necessary labor-power
in the form of organized, compact units, suitable in the mass for the execution of
the simplest homogeneous types of work: the freeing of roads from snow, the
storage of fuel, building work, organization of cartage, etc., etc.
To-day we have already had considerable experience in the work of the labor
application of the army, and can give not merely a preliminary or hypothetical
estimate. What are the conclusions to be drawn from that experience? The
Mensheviks have hastened to draw them. The same Abramovich, again,
announced at the Miners' Congress that we had become bankrupt, that the labor
armies represent parasitic formations, in which there are 100 officials for every
ten workers. Is this true? No. This is the irresponsible and malignant criticism of
men who stand on one side, do not know the facts, collect only fragments and
rubbish, and are concerned in any way and every way either to declare our
bankruptcy or to prophecy it. In reality, the labor armies have not only not gone
bankrupt, but, on the contrary, have had important successes, have displayed
their fidelity, are developing and are becoming stronger and stronger. Just those
prophets have gone bankrupt who foretold that nothing would come of the whole
plan, that nobody would begin to work, and that the Red soldiers would not go to
the labor front but would simply scatter to their homes.
These criticisms were dictated by a philistine scepticism, lack of faith in the

masses, lack of faith in bold initiative, and organization. But did we not hear
exactly the same criticism, at bottom, when we had recourse to extensive
mobilizations for military problems? Then too we were frightened, we were
terrified by stories of mass desertion, which was absolutely inevitable, it was
alleged, after the imperialist war. Naturally, desertion there was, but considered
by the test of experience it proved not at all on such a mass scale as was foretold;
it did not destroy the army; the bond of morale and organization--Communist
voluntarism and State compulsion combined--allowed us to carry out
mobilizations of millions to carry through numerous formations and
redistributions, and to solve the most difficult military problems. In the long run,
the army was victorious. In relation to labor problems, on the foundation of our
military experience, we awaited the same results; and we were not mistaken. The
Red soldiers did not scatter when they were transformed from military to labor
service, as the sceptics prophesied. Thanks to our splendidly-organized agitation,
the transference itself took place amidst great enthusiasm. True, a certain portion
of the soldiers tried to leave the army, but this always happens when a large
military formation is transferred from one front to another, or is sent from the
rear to the front--in general when it is shaken up--and when potential desertion
becomes active. But immediately the political sections, the press, the organs of
struggle with desertion, etc., entered into their rights; and to-day the percentage
of deserters from our labor armies is in no way higher than in our armies on
active service.
The statement that the armies, in view of their internal structure, can produce
only a small percentage of workers, is true only to a certain extent. As far as the
Third Army is concerned, I have already pointed out that it retained its complete
apparatus of administration side by side with an extremely insignificant number
of military units. While we--owing to military and not economic
considerations--retained untouched the staff of the army and its administrative
apparatus, the percentage of workers produced by the army was actually
extremely low. From the general number of 120,000 Red soldiers, 21% proved
to be employed in administrative and economic work; 16% were engaged in
daily detail work (guards, etc.) in connection with the large number of army
institutions and stores; the number of sick, mainly typhus cases, together with
the medico-sanitary personnel, was about 13%; about 25% were not available for
various reasons (detachment, leave, absence without leave, etc.). In this way, the
total personnel available for work constitutes no more than 23%; this is the
maximum of what can be drawn for labor from the given army. Actually, at first,
there worked only about 14%, mainly drawn from the two divisions, rifle and
cavalry, which still remained with the army.
But as soon as it was clear that Denikin had been crushed, and that we should
not have to send the Third Army down the Volga in the spring to assist the
forces on the Caucasus front, we immediately entered upon the disbanding of the
clumsy army apparatus and a more regular adaptation of the army institutions to
problems of labor. Although this work is not yet complete, it has already had
time to give some very significant results. At the present moment (March, 1920),
the former Third Army gives about 38% of its total composition as workers. As
for the military units of the Ural military area working side by side with it, they
already provide 49% of their number as workers. This result is not so bad, if we
compare it with the amount of work done in factories and workshops, amongst
which in the case of many quite recently, in the case of some even to-day,
absence from work for legal and illegal reasons reached 50% and over.[9] To
this one must add that workers in factories and workshops are not infrequently
assisted by the adult members of their family, while the Red soldiers have no
auxiliary force but themselves.
[9] Since that time this percentage has been considerably lowered (June, 1920).
If we take the case of the 19-year-olds, who have been mobilized in the Ural
with the help of the military apparatus--principally for wood fuel work--we shall
find that, out of their general number of over 30,000, over 75% attend work.
This is already a very great step forward. It shows that, using the military
apparatus for mobilization and formation, we can introduce such alterations in
the construction of purely labor units as guarantee an enormous increase in the
percentage of those who participate directly in the material process of
production.
Finally, in connection with the productivity of military labor, we can also now
judge on the basis of experience. During the first days, the productivity of labor
in the principal departments of work, in spite of the great moral enthusiasm, was
in reality very low, and might seem completely discouraging when one reads the
first labor communiqués. Thus, for the preparation of a cubic sazhen of wood, at
first, one had to reckon thirteen to fifteen labor days; whereas the standard--true,
rarely attained at the present day--is reckoned at three days. One must add, in
addition, that artistes in this sphere are capable, under favorable conditions, of
producing one cubic sazhen per day per man. What happened in reality? The
military units were quartered far from the forest to be felled. In many cases it
was necessary to march to and from work 6 to 8 versts, which swallowed up a
considerable portion of the working day. There were not sufficient axes and
saws on the spot. Many Red soldiers, born in the plains, did not know the
forests, had never felled trees, had never chopped or sawed them up. The
provincial and county Timber Committees were very far from knowing at first
how to use the military units, how to direct them where they were required, how
to equip them as they should be equipped. It is not wonderful that all this had as
its result an extremely low level of productivity. But after the most crying
defects in organization were eliminated, results were achieved that were much
more satisfactory. Thus, according to the most recent data, in that same First
Labor Army, four and a half working days are now devoted to one sazhen of
wood, which is not so far from the present standard. What is most comforting,
however, is the fact that the productivity of labor systematically increases, in the
measure of the improvement of its conditions.
While as to what can be achieved in this respect, we have a brief but very rich
experience in the Moscow Engineer Regiment. The Chief Board of Military
Engineers, which controlled this experiment, began with fixing the standard of
production as three working days for a cubic sazhen of wood. This standard soon
proved to be surpassed. In January there were spent on a cubic sazhen of wood
two and one-third working days; in February, 2.1; in March, 1.5; which
represents an exclusively high level of productivity. This result was achieved by
moral influence, by the exact registration of the individual work of each man, by
the awakening of labor pride, by the distribution of bonuses to the workers who
produced more than the average result--or, to speak in the language of the trade
unions, by a sliding scale adaptable to all individual changes in the productivity
of labor. This experiment, carried out almost under laboratory conditions, clearly
indicates the path along which we have to go in future.
At present we have functioning a series of labor armies--the First, the Petrograd,

the Ukrainian, the Caucasian, the South Volga, the Reserve. The latter, as is
known, assisted considerably to raise the traffic capacity of the
Kazan-Ekaterinburg Railway; and, wherever the experiment of the adaptation of
military units for labor problems was carried out with any intelligence at all, the
results showed that this method is unquestionably live and correct.
The prejudice concerning the inevitably parasitic nature of military

organization--under each and every condition--proves to be shattered. The Soviet
Army reproduces within itself the tendencies of the Soviet social order. We must
not think in the petrifying terms of the last epoch: "militarism," "military
organization," "the unproductiveness of compulsory labor." We must approach
the phenomena of the new epoch without any prejudices, and with eyes wide
open; and we must remember that Saturday exists for man, and not vice versa;
that all forms of organization, including the military, are only weapons in the
hands of the working class in power, which has both the right and the possibility
of adapting, altering, refashioning, those weapons, until it has achieved the
requisite result.
THE SINGLE ECONOMIC PLAN
The widest possible application of the principle of general labor service, together
with measures for the militarization of labor, can play a decisive part only in
case they are applied on the basis of a single economic plan covering the whole
country and all branches of productive activity. This plan must be drawn up for a
number of years, for the whole epoch that lies before us. It is naturally broken up
into separate periods or stages, corresponding to the inevitable stages in the
economic rebirth of the country. We shall have to begin with the most simple
and at the same time most fundamental problems.
We have first of all to afford the working class the very possibility of
living--though it be in the most difficult conditions--and thereby to preserve our
industrial centres and save the towns. This is the point of departure. If we do not
wish to melt the town into agriculture, and transform the whole country into a
peasant State, we must support our transport, even at the minimum level, and
secure bread for the towns, fuel and raw materials for industry, fodder for the
cattle. Without this we shall not make one step forward. Consequently, the first
part of the plan comprises the improvement of transport, or, in any case, the
prevention of its further deterioration and the preparation of the most necessary
supplies of food, raw materials, and fuel. The whole of the next period will be in
its entirety filled with the concentration and straining of labor-power to solve
these root problems; and only in this way shall we lay the foundations for all that
is to come. It was such a problem, incidentally, that we put before our labor
armies. Whether the first or the following periods will be measured by months or
by years, it is fruitless at present to guess. This depends on many reasons,
beginning with the international situation and ending with the degree of
single-mindedness and steadfastness of the working class.
The second period is the period of machine-building in the interests of transport

and the storage of raw material and fuel. Here the core is in the locomotive.
At the present time the repairing of locomotives is carried on in too haphazard a

fashion, swallowing up energies and resources beyond all measure. We must
reorganize the repairing of our rolling-stock, on the basis of the mass production
of spare parts. To-day, when the whole network of the railways and the factories
is in the hands of one master, the Labor State, we can and must fix single types
of locomotives and trucks for the whole country, standardize their constituent
parts, draw all the necessary factories into the work of the mass production of
spare parts, reduce repairing to the simple replacing of worn-out parts by new,
and thereby make it possible to build new locomotives on a mass scale out of
spare parts.
Now that the sources of fuel and raw material are again open to us, we must
concentrate our exclusive attention on the building of locomotives.
The third period will be one of machine-building in the interests of the

production of articles of primary necessity.
Finally, the fourth period, reposing on the conquests of the first three, will allow
us to begin the production of articles of personal or secondary significance on
the widest possible scale.
This plan has great significance, not only as a general guide for the practical
work of our economic organs, but also as a line along which propaganda
amongst the laboring masses in connection with our economic problems is to
proceed. Our labor mobilization will not enter into real life, will not take root, if
we do not excite the living interest of all that is honest, class-conscious, and
inspired in the working class. We must explain to the masses the whole truth as
to our situation and as to our views for the future; we must tell them openly that
our economic plan, with the maximum of exertion on the part of the workers,
will neither to-morrow nor the day after give us a land flowing with milk and
honey: for during the first period our chief work will consist in preparing the
conditions for the production of the means of production. Only after we have
secured, though on the smallest possible scale, the possibility of rebuilding the
means of transport and production, shall we pass on to the production of articles
for general consumption. In this way the fruit of their labor, which is the direct
object of the workers, in the shape of articles for personal consumption, will
arrive only in the last, the fourth, stage of our economic plan; and only then shall
we have a serious improvement in our life. The masses, who for a prolonged
period will still bear all the weight of labor and of privation, must realize to the
full the inevitable internal logic of this economic plan if they are to prove
capable of carrying it out.
The sequence of the four economic periods outlined above must not be
understood too absolutely. We do not, of course, propose to bring completely to
a standstill our textile industry: we could not do this for military considerations
alone. But in order that our attention and our forces should not be distracted
under the pressure of requirements and needs crying to us from all quarters, it is
essential to make use of the economic plan as the fundamental criterion, and
separate the important and the fundamental from the auxiliary and secondary.
Needless to say, under no circumstances are we striving for a narrow "national"
Communism: the raising of the blockade, and the European revolution all the
more, would introduce the most radical alterations in our economic plan, cutting
down the stages of its development and bringing them together. But we do not
know when these events will take place; and we must act in such a way that we
can hold out and become stronger under the most unfavorable
circumstances--that is to say, in face of the slowest conceivable development of
the European and the world revolution. In case we are able actually to establish
trading relations with the capitalist countries, we shall again be guided by the
economic plan sketched above. We shall exchange part of our raw material for
locomotives or for necessary machines, but under no circumstances for clothing,
boots, or colonial products: our first item is not articles of consumption, but the
implements of transport and production.
We should be short-sighted sceptics, and the most typical bourgeois

curmudgeons, if we imagined that the rebirth of our economic life will take the
form of a gradual transition from the present economic collapse to the conditions
that preceded that collapse, i.e., that we shall reascend the same steps by which
we descended, and only after a certain, quite prolonged, period will be able to
raise our Socialist economy to the level at which it stood on the eve of the
imperialist war. Such a conception would not only be not consoling, but
absolutely incorrect. Economic collapse, which destroyed and broke up in its
path an incalculable quantity of values, also destroyed a great deal that was poor
and rotten, that was absolutely senseless; and thereby it cleared the path for a
new method of reconstruction, corresponding to that technical equipment which
world economy now possesses.
If Russian capitalism developed not from stage to stage, but leaping over a series
of stages, and instituted American factories in the midst of primitive steppes, the
more is such a forced march possible for Socialist economy. After we have
conquered our terrible misery, have accumulated small supplies of raw material
and food, and have improved our transport, we shall be able to leap over a whole
series of intermediate stages, benefiting by the fact that we are not bound by the
chains of private property, and that therefore we are able to subordinate all
undertakings and all the elements of economic life to a single State plan.
Thus, for example, we shall undoubtedly be able to enter the period of

electrification, in all the chief branches of industry and in the sphere of personal
consumption, without passing through "the age of steam." The programme of
electrification is already drawn up in a series of logically consequent stages,
corresponding to the fundamental stages of the general economic plan.
A new war may slow down the realization of our economic intentions; our
energy and persistence can and must hasten the process of our economic rebirth.
But, whatever be the rate at which economic events unfold themselves in the
future, it is clear that at the foundation of all our work--labor mobilization,
militarization of labor, Subbotniks, and other forms of Communist labor
voluntarism--there must lie the single economic plan. And the period that is
upon us requires from us the complete concentration of all our energies on the
first elementary problems: food, fuel, raw material, transport. Not to allow our
attention to be distracted, not to dissipate our forces, not to waste our energies.
Such is the sole road to salvation.
COLLEGIATE AND ONE-MAN MANAGEMENT
The Mensheviks attempt to dwell on yet another question which seems favorable
to their desire once again to ally themselves with the working class. This is the
question of the method of administration of industrial enterprises--the question
of the collegiate (board) or the one-man principle. We are told that the
transference of factories to single directors instead of to a board is a crime
against the working class and the Socialist revolution. It is remarkable that the
most zealous defenders of the Socialist revolution against the principle of
one-man management are those same Mensheviks who quite recently still
considered that the idea of a Socialist revolution was an insult to history and a
crime against the working class.
The first who must plead guilty in the face of the Socialist revolution is our Party
Congress, which expressed itself in favor of the principle of one-man
management in the administration of industry, and above all in the lowest
grades, in the factories and plants. It would be the greatest possible mistake,
however, to consider this decision as a blow to the independence of the working
class. The independence of the workers is determined and measured not by

whether three workers or one are placed at the head of a factory, but by factors
and phenomena of a such more profound character--the construction of the
economic organs with the active assistance of the trade unions; the building up
of all Soviet organs by means of the Soviet congresses, representing tens of
millions of workers; the attraction into the work of administration, or control of
administration, of those who are administered. It is in such things that the
independence of the working class can be expressed. And if the working class,
on the foundation of its existence, comes through its congresses, Soviet party
and trade union, to the conclusion that it is better to place one person at the head
of a factory, and not a board, it is making a decision dictated by the
independence of the working class. It may be correct or incorrect from the point
of view of the technique of administration, but it is not imposed upon the
proletariat, it is dictated by its own will and pleasure. It would consequently be a
most crying error to confuse the question as to the supremacy of the proletariat
with the question of boards of workers at the head of factories. The dictatorship
of the proletariat is expressed in the abolition of private property in the means of
production, in the supremacy over the whole Soviet mechanism of the collective
will of the workers, and not at all in the form in which individual economic
enterprises are administered.
Here it is necessary to reply to another accusation directed against the defenders

of the one-man principle. Our opponents say: "This is the attempt of the Soviet
militarists to transfer their experience in the military sphere to the sphere of
economics. Possibly in the army the one-man principle is satisfactory, but it does
not suit economical work." Such a criticism is incorrect in every way. It is untrue
that in the army we began with the one-man principle: even now we are far from
having completely adopted it. It is also untrue that in defence of one-man forms
of administration of our economic enterprises with the attraction of experts, we
took our stand only on the foundation of our military experience. In reality, in
this question we took our stand, and continue to do so on purely Marxist views
of the revolutionary problems and creative duties of the proletariat when it has
taken power into its own hands. The necessity of making use of technical
knowledge and methods accumulated in the past, the necessity of attracting
experts and of making use of them on a wide scale, in such a way that our
technique should go not backwards but forwards--all this was understood and
recognized by us, not only from the very beginning of the revolution, but even
long before October. I consider that if the civil war had not plundered our
economic organs of all that was strongest, most independent, most endowed with
initiative, we should undoubtedly have entered the path of one-man management
in the sphere of economic administration much sooner, and much less painfully.
Some comrades look on the apparatus of industrial administration first and

foremost as on a school. This is, of course, absolutely erroneous. The task of
administration is to administer. If a man desires and is able to learn
administration, let him go to school, to the special courses of instruction: let him
go as an assistant, watching and acquiring experience: but a man who is
appointed to control a factory is not going to school, but to a responsible post of
economic administration. And, even if we look at this question in the limited,
and therefore incorrect light of a "school," I will say that when the one-man
principle prevails the school is ten times better: because just as you cannot
replace one good worker by three immature workers, similarly, having placed a
board of three immature workers in a responsible post, you deprive them of the
possibility of realizing their own defects. Each looks to the others when
decisions are being made, and blames the others when success is not
forthcoming.
That this is not a question of principle for the opponents of the one-man
principle is shown best of all by their not demanding the collegiate principle for
the actual workshops, jobs, and pits. They even say with indignation that only a
madman can demand that a board of three or five should manage a workshop.
There must be one manager, and one only. Why? If collegiate administration is a
"school," why do we not require an elementary school? Why should we not
introduce boards into the workshops? And, if the collegiate principle is not a
sacred gospel for the workshops, why is it compulsory for the factories?
Abramovich said here that, as we have few experts--thanks to the Bolsheviks, he

repeats after Kautsky--we shall replace them by boards of workers. That is
nonsense. No board of persons who do not know the given business can replace
one man who knows it. A board of lawyers will not replace one switchman. A
board of patients will not replace the doctor. The very idea is incorrect. A board
in itself does not give knowledge to the ignorant. It can only hide the ignorance
of the ignorant. If a person is appointed to a responsible administrative post, he
is under the watch, not only of others but of himself, and sees clearly what he
knows and what he does not know. But there is nothing worse than a board of
ignorant, badly-prepared workers appointed to a purely practical post,
demanding expert knowledge. The members of the board are in a state of

perpetual panic and mutual dissatisfaction, and by their helplessness introduce
hesitation and chaos into all their work. The working class is very deeply
interested in raising its capacity for administration, that is, in being educated; but
this is attained in the sphere of industry by the periodical report of the
administrative body of a factory before the whole factory, and the discussion of
the economic plan for the year or for the current month. All the workers who
display serious interest in the work of industrial organization are registered by
the directors of the undertaking, or by special commissions; are taken through
appropriate courses closely bound up with the practical work of the factory
itself; and are then appointed, first to less responsible, and then to more
responsible posts. In such a way we shall embrace many thousands, and, in the
future, tens of thousands. But the question of "threes" and "fives" interests, not
the laboring masses, but the more backward, weaker, less fitted for independent
work, section of the Soviet labor bureaucracy. The foremost, intelligent,
determined administrator naturally strives to take the factory into his hands as a
whole, and to show both to himself and to others that he can carry out his work.
While if that administrator is a weakling, who does not stand very steadily on his
feet, he attempts to associate another with himself, for in the company of another
his own weakness will be unnoticed. In such a collegiate principle there is a very
dangerous foundation--the extinction of personal responsibility. If a worker is
capable but not experienced, he naturally requires a guide: under his control he
will learn, and to-morrow we shall appoint him the foreman of a little factory.
That is the way by which he will go forward. In an accidental board, in which
the strength and the weakness of each are not clear, the feeling of responsibility
inevitably disappears.
Our resolution speaks of a systematic approach to the one-man

principle--naturally, not by one stroke of the pen. Variants and combinations are
possible here. Where the worker can manage alone, let us put him in charge of
the factory and give him an expert as an assistant. Where there is a good expert,
let us put him in charge and give him as assistants two or three of the workers.
Finally, where a "board" has in practice shown its capacity for work, let us
preserve it. This is the sole serious attitude to take up, and only in such a way
shall we reach the correct organization of production.
There is another consideration of a social and educational character which seems

to me most important. Our guiding layer of the working class is too thin. That
layer which knew underground work, which long carried on the revolutionary
struggle, which was abroad, which read much in prisons and in exile, which had
political experience and a broad outlook, is the most precious section of the
working class. Then there is a younger generation which has consciously been
making the revolution, beginning with 1917. This is a very valuable section of
the working class. Wherever we cast our eye--on Soviet construction, on the
trade unions, on the front of the civil war--everywhere we find the principal part
being played by this upper layer of the proletariat. The chief work of the Soviet
Government during these two and a half years consisted in manoeuvring and
throwing the foremost section of the workers from one front to another. The
deeper layers of the working class, which emerged from the peasant mass, are
revolutionarily inclined, but are still too poor in initiative. The disease of our
Russian peasant is the herd instinct, the absence of personality: in other words,
the same quality that used to be extolled by our reactionary Populists, and that
Leo Tolstoy extolled in the character of Platon Karatayev: the peasant melting
into his village community, subjecting himself to the land. It is quite clear that
Socialist economy is founded not on Platon Karatayev, but on the thinking
worker endowed with initiative. That personal initiative it is necessary to
develop in the worker. The personal basis under the bourgeoisie meant selfish
individualism and competition. The personal basis under the working class is in
contradiction neither to solidarity nor to brotherly co-operation. Socialist
solidarity can rely neither on absence of personality nor on the herd instinct. And
it is just absence of personality that is frequently hidden behind the collegiate
principle.
In the working class there are many forces, gifts, and talents. They must be
brought out and displayed in rivalry. The one-man principle in the administrative
and technical sphere assists this. That is why it is higher and more fruitful than
the collegiate principle.
CONCLUSION OF THE REPORT
Comrades, the arguments of the Menshevik orators, particularly of Abramovich,

reflect first of all their complete detachment from life and its problems. An
observer stands on the bank of a river which he has to swim over, and deliberates
on the qualities of the water and on the strength of the current. He has to swim
over: that is his task! But our Kautskian stands first on one foot and then on the
other. "We do not deny," he says, "the necessity of swimming over, but at the
same time, as realists, we see the danger--and not only one, but several: the
current is swift, there are submerged stones, people are tired, etc., etc. But when
they tell you that we deny the very necessity of swimming over, that is not
true--no, not under any circumstances. Twenty-three years ago we did not deny
the necessity of swimming over...."
And on this is built all, from beginning to end. First, say the Mensheviks, we do
not deny, and never did deny, the necessity of self-defence: consequently we do
not repudiate the army. Secondly, we do not repudiate in principle general labor
service. But, after all, where is there anyone in the world, with the exception of
small religious sects, who denies self-defence "in principle"! Nevertheless, the
matter does not move one step forward as a result of your abstract admission.
When it came to a real struggle, and to the creation of a real army against the
real enemies of the working class, what did you do then? You opposed, you
sabotaged--while not repudiating self-defence in principle. You said and wrote
in your papers: "Down with the civil war!" at the time when we were surrounded
by White Guards, and the knife was at our throat. Now you, approving our
victorious self-defence after the event, transfer your critical gaze to new
problems, and attempt to teach us. "In general, we do not repudiate the principle
of general labor service," you say, "but ... without legal compulsion." Yet in
these very words there is a monstrous internal contradiction! The idea of
"obligatory service" itself includes the element of compulsion. A man is obliged,
he is bound to do something. If he does not do it, obviously he will suffer
compulsion, a penalty. Here we approach the question of what penalty.
Abramovich says: "Economic pressure, yes; but not legal compulsion." Comrade
Holtzman, the representative of the Metal Workers' Union, excellently
demonstrated all the scholasticism of this idea. Even under the capitalism, that is
to say under the regime of "free" labor, economic pressure is inseparable from
legal compulsion. Still more so now.
In my report I attempted to explain that the adaptation of the workers on new

social foundations to new forms of labor, and the attainment of a higher level of
productivity of labor, are possible only by means of the simultaneous application
of various methods--economic interest, legal compulsion, the influence of an
internally co-ordinated economic organization, the power of repression, and, first
and last, moral influence, agitation, propaganda, and the general raising of the
cultural level.
Only by the combination of all these methods can we attain a high level of
Socialist economy.
If even under capitalism economic interest is inevitably combined with legal

compulsion, behind which stands the material force of the State, in the Soviet
State--that is, the State of transition to Socialism--we can draw no water-tight
compartment at all between economic and legal compulsion. All our most
important industries are in the hands of the State. When we say to the turner
Ivanov, "You are bound at once to work at the Sormovo factory; if you refuse,
you will not receive your ration," what are we to call it? Economic pressure or
legal compulsion? He cannot go to another factory, for all factories are in the
hands of the State, which will not allow such a change. Consequently, economic
pressure melts here into the pressure of State compulsion. Abramovich
apparently would like us, as regulators of the distribution of labor-power, to
make use only of such means as the raising of wages, bonuses, etc., in order to
attract the necessary workers to our most important factories. Apparently that
comprises all his thoughts on the subject. But if we put the question in this way,
every serious worker in the trade union movement will understand it is pure
utopia. We cannot hope for a free influx of labor-power from the market, for to
achieve this the State would need to have in its hands sufficiently extensive
"reserves of manoeuvre," in the form of food, housing, and transport, i.e.,
precisely those conditions which we have yet only to create. Without
systematically-organized transference of labor-power on a mass scale, according
to the demands of the economic organization, we shall achieve nothing. Here the
moment of compulsion arises before us in all its force of economic necessity. I
read you a telegram from Ekaterinburg dealing with the work of the First Labor
Army. It says that there have passed through the Ural Committee for Labor
Service over 4,000 workers. Whence have they appeared? Mainly from the
former Third Army. They were not allowed to go to their homes, but were sent
where they were required. From the army they were handed over to the
Committee for Labor Service, which distributed them according to their
categories and sent them to the factories. This, from the Liberal point of view, is
"violence" to the freedom of the individual. Yet an overwhelming majority of
the workers went willingly to the labor front, as hitherto to the military, realizing
that the common interest demanded this. Part went against their will. These were
compelled.
Naturally, it is quite clear that the State must, by means of the bonus system,
give the better workers better conditions of existence. But this not only does not
exclude, but on the contrary pre-supposes, that the State and the trade
unions--without which the Soviet State will not build up industry--acquire new
rights of some kind over the worker. The worker does not merely bargain with
the Soviet State: no, he is subordinated to the Soviet State, under its orders in
every direction--for it is his State.
"If," Abramovich says, "we were simply told that it is a question of industrial
discipline, there would be nothing to quarrel about; but why introduce
militarization?" Of course, to a considerable extent, the question is one of the
discipline of the trade unions; but of the new discipline of new, Productional,
trade unions. We live in a Soviet country, where the working class is in power--a
fact which our Kautskians do not understand. When the Menshevik Rubtzov said
that there remained only the fragment of the trade union movement in my report,
there was a certain amount of truth in it. Of the trade unions, as he understands
them--that is to say, trade unions of the old craft type--there in reality has
remained very little; but the industrial productional organization of the working
class, in the conditions of Soviet Russia, has the very greatest tasks before it.
What tasks? Of course, not the tasks involved in a struggle with the State, in the
name of the interests of labor; but tasks involved in the construction, side by side
with the State, of Socialist economy. Such a form of union is in principle a new
organization, which is distinct, not only from the trade unions, but also from the
revolutionary industrial unions in bourgeois society, just as the supremacy of the
proletariat is distinct from the supremacy of the bourgeoisie. The productional
union of the ruling working class no longer has the problems, the methods, the
discipline, of the union for struggle of an oppressed class. All our workers are
obliged to enter the unions. The Mensheviks are against this. This is quite
comprehensible, because in reality they are against the dictatorship of the
proletariat. It is to this, in the long run, that the whole question is reduced. The
Kautskians are against the dictatorship of the proletariat, and are thereby against
all its consequences. Both economic and political compulsion are only forms of
the expression of the dictatorship of the working class in two closely connected
regions. True, Abramovich demonstrated to us most learnedly that under
Socialism there will be no compulsion, that the principle of compulsion
contradicts Socialism, that under Socialism we shall be moved by the feeling of
duty, the habit of working, the attractiveness of labor, etc., etc. This is
unquestionable. Only this unquestionable truth must be a little extended. In point
of fact, under Socialism there will not exist the apparatus of compulsion itself,
namely, the State: for it will have melted away entirely into a producing and
consuming commune. None the less, the road to Socialism lies through a period
of the highest possible intensification of the principle of the State. And you and I
are just passing through that period. Just as a lamp, before going out, shoots up
in a brilliant flame, so the State, before disappearing, assumes the form of the
dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the most ruthless form of State, which
embraces the life of the citizens authoritatively in every direction. Now just that
insignificant little fact--that historical step of the State
dictatorship--Abramovich, and in his person the whole of Menshevism, did not
notice; and consequently, he has fallen over it.
No organization except the army has ever controlled man with such severe
compulsion as does the State organization of the working class in the most
difficult period of transition. It is just for this reason that we speak of the
militarization of labor. The fate of the Mensheviks is to drag along at the tail of
events, and to recognize those parts of the revolutionary programme which have
already had time to lose all practical significance. To-day the Mensheviks, albeit
with reservations, do not deny the lawfulness of stern measures with the White
Guards and with deserters from the Red Army: they have been forced to
recognize this after their own lamentable experiments with "democracy." They
have to all appearances understood--very late in the day--that, when one is face
to face with the counter-revolutionary bands, one cannot live by phrases about
the great truth that under Socialism we shall need no Red Terror. But in the
economic sphere, the Mensheviks still attempt to refer us to our sons, and
particularly to our grandsons. None the less, we have to rebuild our economic
life to-day, without waiting, under circumstances of a very painful heritage from
bourgeois society and a yet unfinished civil war.
Menshevism, like all Kautskianism generally, is drowned in democratic

analogies and Socialist abstractions. Again and again it has been shown that for
it there do not exist the problems of the transitional period, i.e., of the proletarian
revolution. Hence the lifelessness of its criticism, its advice, its plans, and its
recipes. The question is not what is going to happen in twenty or thirty years'
time--at that date, of course, things will be much better--but of how to-day to
struggle out of our ruins, how immediately to distribute labor-power, how to-day
to raise the productivity of labor, and how, in particular, to act in the case of
those 4,000 skilled workers whom we combed out of the army in the Ural. To
dismiss them to the four corners of the earth, saying "seek for better conditions
where you can find them, comrades"? No, we could not act in this way. We put
them into military echelons, and distributed them amongst the factories and the
works.
"Wherein, then, does your Socialism," Abramovich cries, "differ from Egyptian
slavery? It was just by similar methods that the Pharaohs built the pyramids,
forcing the masses to labor." Truly an inimitable analogy for a "Socialist"! Once
again the little insignificant fact has been forgotten--the class nature of the
government! Abramovich sees no difference between the Egyptian regime and
our own. He has forgotten that in Egypt there were Pharaohs, there were
slave-owners and slaves. It was not the Egyptian peasants who decided through
their Soviets to build the pyramids; there existed a social order based upon
hierarchial caste; and the workers were obliged to toil by a class that was hostile
to them. Our compulsion is applied by a workers' and peasants' government, in
the name of the interests of the laboring masses. That is what Abramovich has
not observed. We learn in the school of Socialism that all social evolution is
founded on classes and their struggle, and all the course of human life is
determined by the fact of what class stands at the head of affairs, and in the
name of what caste is applying its policy. That is what Abramovich has not
grasped. Perhaps he is well acquainted with the Old Testament, but Socialism is
for him a book sealed with seven seals.
Going along the path of shallow Liberal analogies, which do not reckon with the
class nature of the State, Abramovich might (and in the past the Mensheviks did
more than once) identify the Red and the White Armies. Both here and there
went on mobilizations, principally of the peasant masses. Both here and there the
element of compulsion has its place. Both here and there there were not a few
officers who had passed through one and the same school of Tsarism. The same
rifles, the same cartridges in both camps. Where is the difference? There is a
difference, gentlemen, and it is defined by a fundamental test: who is in power?
The working class or the landlord class, Pharaohs or peasants, White Guards or
the Petrograd proletariat? There is a difference, and evidence on the subject is
furnished by the fate of Yudenich, Kolchak, and Denikin. Our peasants were
mobilized by the workers; in Kolchak's camp, by the White Guard officer class.
Our army has pulled itself together, and has grown strong; the White Army has
fallen asunder in dust. Yes, there is a difference between the Soviet regime and
the regime of the Pharaohs. And it is not in vain that the Petrograd proletarians
began their revolution by shooting the Pharaohs on the steeples of Petrograd.[10]
[10] This was the name given to the imperial police, whom the Minister for
Home Affairs, Protopopoff, distributed at the end of February, 1917, over the
roofs of houses and in the belfries.
One of the Menshevik orators attempted incidentally to represent me as a

defender of militarism in general. According to his information, it appears, do
you see, that I am defending nothing more or less than German militarism. I
proved, you must understand, that the German N.C.O. was a marvel of nature,
and all that he does is above criticism. What did I say in reality? Only that
militarism, in which all the features of social evolution find their most finished,
sharp, and clear expression, could be examined from two points of view. First
from the political or Socialist--and here it depends entirely on the question of
what class is in power; and secondly, from the point of view of organization, as a
system of the strict distribution of duties, exact mutual relations, unquestioning
responsibility, and harsh insistence on execution. The bourgeois army is the
apparatus of savage oppression and repression of the workers; the Socialist army
is a weapon for the liberation and defence of the workers. But the unquestioning
subordination of the parts to the whole is a characteristic common to every army.
A severe internal regime is inseparable from the military organization. In war
every piece of slackness, every lack of thoroughness, and even a simple mistake,
not infrequently bring in their train the most heavy sacrifices. Hence the striving
of the military organization to bring clearness, definiteness, exactness of
relations and responsibilities, to the highest degree of development. "Military"
qualities in this connection are valued in every sphere. It was in this sense that I
said that every class prefers to have in its service those of its members who,
other things being equal, have passed through the military school. The German
peasant, for example, who has passed out of the barracks in the capacity of an
N.C.O. was for the German monarchy, and remains for the Ebert Republic,
much dearer and more valuable than the same peasant who has not passed
through military training. The apparatus of the German railways was splendidly
organized, thanks to a considerable degree to the employment of N.C.O.'s and
officers in administrative posts in the transport department. In this sense we also
have something to learn from militarism. Comrade Tsiperovich, one of our
foremost trade union leaders, admitted here that the trade union worker who has
passed through military training--who has, for example, occupied the responsible
post of regimental commissary for a year--does not become worse from the point
of view of trade union work as a result. He is returned to the union the same
proletarian from head to foot, for he was fighting for the proletariat; but he has
returned a veteran--hardened, more independent, more decisive--for he has been
in very responsible positions. He had occasions to control several thousands of
Red soldiers of different degrees of class-consciousness--most of them peasants.
Together with them he has lived through victories and reverses, he has advanced
and retreated. There were cases of treachery on the part of the command
personnel, of peasant risings, of panic--but he remained at his post, he held
together the less class-conscious mass, directed it, inspired it with his example,
punished traitors and cowards. This experience is a great and valuable
experience. And when a former regimental commissary returns to his trade
union, he becomes not a bad organizer.
On the question of the collegiate principle, the arguments of Abramovich are

just as lifeless as on all other questions--the arguments of a detached observer
standing on the bank of a river.
Abramovich explained to us that a good board is better than a bad manager, that
into a good board there must enter a good expert. All this is splendid--only why
do not the Mensheviks offer us several hundred boards? I think that the Supreme
Economic Council will find sufficient use for them. But we--not observers, but
workers--must build from the material at our disposal. We have specialists, we
have experts, of whom, shall we say, one-third are conscientious and educated,
another third only half-conscientious and half-educated, and the last third are no
use at all. In the working class there are many talented, devoted, and energetic
people. Some--unfortunately few--have already the necessary knowledge and
experience. Some have character and capacity, but have not knowledge or
experience. Others have neither one nor the other. Out of this material we have
to create our factory and other administrative bodies; and here we cannot be
satisfied with general phrases. First of all, we must select all the workers who
have already in experience shown that they can direct enterprises, and give such
men the possibility of standing on their own feet. Such men themselves ask for
one-man management, because the work of controlling a factory is not a school
for the backward. A worker who knows his business thoroughly desires to
control. If he has decided and ordered, his decision must be accomplished. He
may be replaced--that is another matter; but while he is the master--the Soviet,
proletarian master--he controls the undertaking entirely and completely. If he has
to be included in a board of weaker men, who interfere in the administration,
nothing will come of it. Such a working-class administrator must be given an

expert assistant, one or two according to the enterprise. If there is no suitable
working-class administrator, but there is a conscientious and trained expert, we
shall put him at the head of an enterprise, and attach to him two or three
prominent workers in the capacity of assistants, in such a way that every
decision of the expert should be known to the assistants, but that they should not
have the right to reverse that decision. They will, step by step, follow the
specialist in his work, will learn something, and in six months or a year will thus
be able to occupy independent posts.
Abramovich quoted from my own speech the example of the hairdresser who has
commanded a division and an army. True! But what, however, Abramovich does
not know is that, if our Communist comrades have begun to command
regiments, divisions, and armies, it is because previously they were
commissaries attached to expert commanders. The responsibility fell on the
expert, who knew that, if he made a mistake, he would bear the full brunt, and
would not be able to say that he was only an "adviser" or a "member of the
board." To-day in our army the majority of the posts of command, particularly in
the lower--i.e., politically the most important--grades, are filled by workers and
foremost peasants. But with what did we begin? We put officers in the posts of
command, and attached to them workers as commissaries; and they learned, and
learned with success, and learned to beat the enemy.
Comrades, we stand face to face with a very difficult period, perhaps the most
difficult of all. To difficult periods in the life of peoples and classes there
correspond harsh measures. The further we go the easier things will become, the
freer every citizen will feel, the more imperceptible will become the compelling
force of the proletarian State. Perhaps we shall then even allow the Mensheviks
to have papers, if only the Mensheviks remain in existence until that time. But
to-day we are living in the period of dictatorship, political and economic. And
the Mensheviks continue to undermine that dictatorship. When we are fighting
on the civil front, preserving the revolution from its enemies, and the Menshevik
paper writes: "Down with the civil war," we cannot permit this. A dictatorship is
a dictatorship, and war is war. And now that we have crossed to the path of the
greatest concentration of forces on the field of the economic rebirth of the
country, the Russian Kautskies, the Mensheviks, remain true to their
counter-revolutionary calling. Their voice, as hitherto, sounds as the voice of
doubt and decomposition, of disorganization and undermining, of distrust and
collapse.
Is it not monstrous and grotesque that, at this Congress, at which 1,500

representatives of the Russian working class are present, where the Mensheviks
constitute less than 5%, and the Communists about 90%, Abramovich should say
to us: "Do not be attracted by methods which result in a little band taking the
place of the people." "All through the people," says the representative of the
Mensheviks, "no guardians of the laboring masses! All through the laboring
masses, through their independent activity!" And, further, "It is impossible to
convince a class by arguments." Yet look at this very hall: here is that class! The
working class is here before you, and with us; and it is just you, an insignificant
band of Mensheviks, who are attempting to convince it by bourgeois arguments!
It is you who wish to be the guardians of that class. And yet it has its own high
degree of independence, and that independence, it has displayed, incidentally, in
having overthrown you and gone forward along its own path!
KARL KAUTSKY, HIS SCHOOL AND HIS BOOK.
The Austro-Marxian school (Bauer, Renner, Hilferding, Max Adler, Friedrich

Adler) in the past more than once was contrasted with the school of Kautsky, as
veiled opportunism might be contrasted with true Marxism. This has proved to
be a pure historical misunderstanding, which deceived some for a long time,
some for a lesser period, but which in the end was revealed with all possible
clearness. Kautsky is the founder and the most perfect representative of the
Austrian forgery of Marxism. While the real teaching of Marx is the theoretical
formula of action, of attack, of the development of revolutionary energy, and of
the carrying of the class blow to its logical conclusion, the Austrian school was
transformed into an academy of passivity and evasiveness, because of a vulgar
historical and conservative school, and reduced its work to explaining and
justifying, not guiding and overthrowing. It lowered itself to the position of a
hand-maid to the current demands of parliamentarism and opportunism, replaced
dialectic by swindling sophistries, and, in the end, in spite of its great play with
ritual revolutionary phraseology, became transformed into the most secure
buttress of the capitalist State, together with the altar and throne that rose above
it. If the latter was engulfed in the abyss, no blame for this can be laid upon the
Austro-Marxian school.
What characterizes Austro-Marxism is repulsion and fear in the face of

revolutionary action. The Austro-Marxist is capable of displaying a perfect gulf
of profundity in the explanation of yesterday, and considerable daring in
prophesying concerning to-morrow--but for to-day he never has a great thought
or capacity for great action. To-day for him always disappears before the wave
of little opportunist worries, which later are explained as the most inevitable link
between the past and the future.
The Austro-Marxist is inexhaustible when it is a question of discovering reasons

to prevent initiative and render difficult revolutionary action. Austro-Marxism is
a learned and boastful theory of passivity and capitulation. Naturally, it is not by
accident that it was just in Austria, in that Babylon torn by fruitless national
antagonisms, in that State which represented the personified impossibility to
exist and develop, that there arose and was consolidated the pseudo-Marxian
philosophy of the impossibility of revolutionary action.
The foremost Austrian Marxists represent, each in his own way, a certain
"individuality." On various questions they more than once did not see eye to eye.
They even had political differences. But in general they are fingers of the same
hand.
Karl Renner is the most pompous, solid, and conceited representative of this
type. The gift of literary imitation, or, more simply, of stylist forgery, is granted
to him to an exceptional extent. His May Day article represented a charming
combination of the most revolutionary words. And, as both words and their
combinations live, within certain limits, with their own independent life,
Renner's articles awakened in the hearts of many workers a revolutionary fire
which their author apparently never knew. The tinsel of Austro-Viennese
culture, the chase of the external, of title of rank, was more characteristic of
Renner than of his other colleagues. In essence he always remained merely an
imperial and royal officer, who commanded Marxist phraseology to perfection.
The transformation of the author of the jubilee article on Karl Marx, famous for
its revolutionary pathos, into a comic-opera-Chancellor, who expresses his
feelings of respect and thanks to the Scandinavian monarchs, is in reality one of
the most instructive paradoxes of history.
Otto Bauer is more learned and prosaic, more serious and more boring, than
Renner. He cannot be denied the capacity to read books, collect facts, and draw
conclusions adapted to the tasks imposed upon him by practical politics, which
in turn are guided by others. Bauer has no political will. His chief art is to reply
to all acute practical questions by commonplaces. His political thought always
lives a parallel life to his will--it is deprived of all courage. His words are always
merely the scientific compilation of the talented student of a University seminar.
The most disgraceful actions of Austrian opportunism, the meanest servility
before the power of the possessing classes on the part of the Austro-German
Social-Democracy, found in Bauer their grave elucidator, who sometimes
expressed himself with dignity against the form, but always agreed in the
essence. If it ever occurred to Bauer to display anything like temperament and
political energy, it was exclusively in the struggle against the revolutionary
wing--in the accumulation of arguments, facts, quotations, against revolutionary
action. His highest period was that (after 1907) in which, being as yet too young
to be a deputy, he played the part of secretary of the Social-Democratic group,
supplied it with materials, figures, substitutes for ideas, instructed it, drew up
memoranda, and appeared almost to be the inspirer of great actions, when in
reality he was only supplying substitutes, and adulterated substitutes, for the
parliamentary opportunists.
Max Adler represents a fairly ingenuous variety of the Austro-Marxian type. He

is a lyric poet, a philosopher, a mystic--a philosophical lyric poet of passivity, as
Renner is its publicist and legal expert, as Hilferding is its economist, as Bauer is
its sociologist. Max Adler is cramped in a world of three dimensions, although
he had found a very comfortable place for himself with the framework of
Viennese bourgeois Socialism and the Hapsburg State. The combination of the
petty business activity of an attorney and of political humiliation, together with
barren philosophical efforts and the cheap tinsel flowers of idealism, have
imbued that variety which Max Adler represented with a sickening and repulsive
quality.
Rudolf Hilferding, a Viennese like the rest, entered the German

Social-Democratic Party almost as a mutineer, but as a mutineer of the Austrian
stamp, i.e., always ready to capitulate without a fight. Hilferding took the
external mobility and bustle of the Austrian policy which brought him up for
revolutionary initiative; and for a round dozen of months he demanded--true, in
the most moderate terms--a more intelligent policy on the part of the leaders of
the German Social-Democracy. But the Austro-Viennese bustle swiftly

disappeared from his own nature. He soon became subjected to the mechanical
rhythm of Berlin and the automatic spiritual life of the German
Social-Democracy. He devoted his intellectual energy to the purely theoretical
sphere, where he did not say a great deal, true--no Austro-Marxist has ever said a
great deal in any sphere--but in which he did, at any rate, write a serious book.
With this book on his back, like a porter with a heavy load, he entered the
revolutionary epoch. But the most scientific book cannot replace the absence of
will, of initiative, of revolutionary instinct and political decision, without which
action is inconceivable. A doctor by training, Hilferding is inclined to sobriety,
and, in spite of his theoretical education, he represents the most primitive type of
empiricist in questions of policy. The chief problem of to-day is for him not to
leave the lines laid down for him by yesterday, and to find for this conservative
and bourgeois apathy a scientific, economic explanation.
Friedrich Adler is the most balanced representative of the Austro-Marxian type.

He has inherited from his father the latter's political temperament. In the petty
exhausting struggle with the disorder of Austrian conditions, Friedrich Adler
allowed his ironical scepticism finally to destroy the revolutionary foundations
of his world outlook. The temperament inherited from his father more than once
drove him into opposition to the school created by his father. At certain moments
Friedrich Adler might seem the very revolutionary negation of the Austrian
school. In reality, he was and remains its necessary coping-stone. His explosive
revolutionism foreshadowed acute attacks of despair amidst Austrian
opportunism, which from time to time became terrified at its own insignificance.
Friedrich Adler is a sceptic from head to foot: he does not believe in the masses,
or in their capacity for action. At the time when Karl Liebknecht, in the hour of
supreme triumph of German militarism, went out to the Potsdamerplatz to call
the oppressed masses to the open struggle, Friedrich Adler went into a bourgeois
restaurant to assassinate there the Austrian Premier. By his solitary shot,
Friedrich Adler vainly attempted to put an end to his own scepticism. After that
hysterical strain, he fell into still more complete prostration.
The black-and-yellow crew of social-patriotism (Austerlitz, Leitner, etc.) hurled

at Adler the terrorist all the abuse of which the cowardly sentiments were
capable.
But when the acute period was passed, and the prodigal son returned from his
convict prison into his father's house with the halo of a martyr, he proved to be
doubly and trebly valuable in that form for the Austrian Social-Democracy. The
golden halo of the terrorist was transformed by the experienced counterfeiters of
the party into the sounding coin of the demagogue. Friedrich Adler became a
trusted surety for the Austerlitzes and Renners in face of the masses. Happily,
the Austrian workers are coming less and less to distinguish the sentimental
lyrical prostration of Friedrich Adler from the pompous shallowness of Renner,
the erudite impotence of Max Adler, or the analytical self-satisfaction of Otto
Bauer.
The cowardice in thought of the theoreticians of the Austro-Marxian school has

completely and wholly been revealed when faced with the great problems of a
revolutionary epoch. In his immortal attempt to include the Soviet system in the
Ebert-Noske Constitution, Hilferding gave voice not only to his own spirit but to
the spirit of the whole Austro-Marxian school, which, with the approach of the
revolutionary epoch, made an attempt to become exactly as much more Left than
Kautsky as before the revolution it was more Right. From this point of view,
Max Adler's view of the Soviet system is extremely instructive.
The Viennese eclectic philosopher admits the significance of the Soviets. His
courage goes so far that he adopts them. He even proclaims them the apparatus
of the Social Revolution. Max Adler, of course, is for a social revolution. But not
for a stormy, barricaded, terrorist, bloody revolution, but for a sane,
economically balanced, legally canonized, and philosophically approved
revolution.
Max Adler is not even terrified by the fact that the Soviets infringe the
"principle" of the constitutional separation of powers (in the Austrian
Social-Democracy there are many fools who see in such an infringement a great
defect of the Soviet System!). On the contrary, Max Adler, the trade union
lawyer and legal adviser of the social revolution, sees in the concentration of
powers even an advantage, which allows the direct expression of the proletarian
will. Max Adler is in favor of the direct expression of the proletarian will; but
only not by means of the direct seizure of power through the Soviets. He
proposes a more solid method. In each town, borough, and ward, the Workers'
Councils must "control" the police and other officials, imposing upon them the
"proletarian will." What, however, will be the "constitutional" position of the
Soviets in the republic of Zeiz, Renner and company? To this our philosopher
replies: "The Workers' Councils in the long run will receive as much
constitutional power as they acquire by means of their own activity."
(Arbeiterzeitung, No. 179, July 1, 1919.)
The proletarian Soviets must gradually grow up into the political power of the
proletariat, just as previously, in the theories of reformism, all the proletarian
organizations had to grow up into Socialism; which consummation, however,
was a little hindered by the unforeseen misunderstandings, lasting four years,
between the Central Powers and the Entente--and all that followed. It was found
necessary to reject the economical programme of a gradual development into
Socialism without a social revolution. But, as a reward, there opened the
perspective of the gradual development of the Soviets into the social revolution,
without an armed rising and a seizure of power.
In order that the Soviets should not sink entirely under the burden of borough
and ward problems, our daring legal adviser proposes the propaganda of
social-democratic ideas! Political power remains as before in the hands of the
bourgeoisie and its assistants. But in the wards and the boroughs the Soviets
control the policemen and their assistants. And, to console the working class and
at the same time to centralize its thought and will, Max Adler on Sunday
afternoons will read lectures on the constitutional position of the Soviets, as in
the past he read lectures on the constitutional position of the trade unions.
"In this way," Max Adler promises, "the constitutional regulation of the position
of the Workers Councils, and their power and importance, would be guaranteed
along the whole line of public and social life; and--without the dictatorship of
the Soviets--the Soviet system would acquire as large an influence as it could
possibly have even in a Soviet republic. At the same time we should not have to
pay for that influence by political storms and economic destruction" (idem). As
we see, in addition to all his other qualities, Max Adler remains still in
agreement with the Austrian tradition: to make a revolution without quarrelling
with his Excellency the Public Prosecutor.
*****
The founder of this school, and its highest authority, is Kautsky. Carefully
protecting, particularly after the Dresden party congress and the first Russian
Revolution, his reputation as the keeper of the shrine of Marxist orthodoxy,

Kautsky from time to time would shake his head in disapproval of the more
compromising outbursts of his Austrian school. And, following the example of
the late Victor Adler, Bauer, Renner, Hilferding--altogether and each
separately--considered Kautsky too pedantic, too inert, but a very reverend and a
very useful father and teacher of the church of quietism.
Kautsky began to cause serious mistrust in his own school during the period of
his revolutionary culmination, at the time of the first Russian Revolution, when
he recognized as necessary the seizure of power by the Russian
Social-Democracy, and attempted to inoculate the German working class with
his theoretical conclusions from the experience of the general strike in Russia.
The collapse of the first Russian Revolution at once broke off Kautsky's
evolution along the path of radicalism. The more plainly was the question of
mass action in Germany itself put forward by the course of events, the more
evasive became Kautsky's attitude. He marked time, retreated, lost his
confidence; and the pedantic and scholastic features of his thought more and
more became apparent. The imperialist war, which killed every form of
vagueness and brought mankind face to face with the most fundamental
questions, exposed all the political bankruptcy of Kautsky. He immediately
became confused beyond all hope of extrication, in the most simple question of
voting the War Credits. All his writings after that period represent variations of
one and the same theme: "I and my muddle." The Russian Revolution finally
slew Kautsky. By all his previous development he was placed in a hostile
attitude towards the November victory of the proletariat. This unavoidably threw
him into the camp of the counter-revolution. He lost the last traces of historical
instinct. His further writings have become more and more like the yellow
literature of the bourgeois market.
Kautsky's book, examined by us, bears in its external characteristics all the
attributes of a so-called objective scientific study. To examine the extent of the
Red Terror, Kautsky acts with all the circumstantial method peculiar to him. He
begins with the study of the social conditions which prepared the great French
Revolution, and also the physiological and social conditions which assisted the
development of cruelty and humanity throughout the history of the human race.
In a book devoted to Bolshevism, in which the whole question is examined in
234 pages, Kautsky describes in detail on what our most remote human ancestor
fed, and hazards the guess that, while living mainly on vegetable products, he
devoured also insects and possibly a few birds. (See page 122.) In a word, there
was nothing to lead us to expect that from such an entirely respectable
ancestor--one obviously inclined to vegetarianism--there should spring such
descendants as the Bolsheviks. That is the solid scientific basis on which
Kautsky builds the question!...
But, as is not infrequent with productions of this nature, there is hidden behind
the academic and scholastic cloak a malignant political pamphlet. This book is
one of the most lying and conscienceless of its kind. Is it not incredible, at first
glance, that Kautsky should gather up the most contemptible stories about the
Bolsheviks from the rich table of Havas, Reuter and Wolff, thereby displaying
from under his learned night-cap the ears of the sycophant? Yet these
disreputable details are only mosaic decorations on the fundamental background
of solid, scientific lying about the Soviet Republic and its guiding party.
Kautsky depicts in the most sinister colors our savagery towards the bourgeoisie,
which "displayed no tendency to resist."
Kautsky attacks our ruthlessness in connection with the Socialist Revolutionaries

and the Mensheviks, who represent "shades" of Socialism.
KAUTSKY DEPICTS THE SOVIET ECONOMY AS THE CHAOS OF

COLLAPSE
Kautsky represents the Soviet workers, and the Russian working class as a
whole, as a conglomeration of egoists, loafers, and cowards.
He does not say one word about the conduct of the Russian bourgeoisie,
unprecedented in history for the magnitude of its scoundrelism; about its
national treachery; about the surrender of Riga to the Germans, with
"educational" aims; about the preparations for a similar surrender of Petrograd;
about its appeals to foreign armies--Czecho-Slovakian, German, Roumanian,
British, Japanese, French, Arab and Negro--against the Russian workers and
peasants; about its conspiracies and assassinations, paid for by Entente money;
about its utilization of the blockade, not only to starve our children to death, but
systematically, tirelessly, persistently to spread over the whole world an
unheard-of web of lies and slander.
He does not say one word about the most disgraceful misrepresentations of and
violence to our party on the part of the government of the S.R.s and Mensheviks
before the November Revolution; about the criminal persecution of several
thousand responsible workers of the party on the charge of espionage in favor of
Hohenzollern Germany; about the participation of the Mensheviks and S.R.s in
all the plots of the bourgeoisie; about their collaboration with the imperial
generals and admirals, Kolchak, Denikin and Yudenich; about the terrorist acts
carried out by the S.R.s at the order of the Entente; about the risings organized
by the S.R.s with the money of the foreign missions in our army, which was
pouring out its blood in the struggle against the monarchical bands of
imperialism.
Kautsky does not say one word about the fact that we not only repeated more
than once, but proved in reality our readiness to give peace to the country, even
at the cost of sacrifices and concessions, and that, in spite of this, we were
obliged to carry on an intensive struggle on all fronts to defend the very
existence of our country, and to prevent its transformation into a colony of
Anglo-French imperialism.
Kautsky does not say one word about the fact that in this heroic struggle, in
which we are defending the future of world Socialism, the Russian proletariat is
obliged to expend its principal energies, its best and most valuable forces, taking
them away from economic and cultural reconstruction.
In all his book, Kautsky does not even mention the fact that first of all German
militarism, with the help of its Scheidemanns and the apathy of its Kautskies,
and then the militarism of the Entente countries with the help of its Renaudels
and the apathy of its Longuets, surrounded us with an iron blockade; seized all
our ports; cut us off from the whole of the world; occupied, with the help of
hired White bands, enormous territories, rich in raw materials; and separated us
for a long period from the Baku oil, the Donetz coal, the Don and Siberian corn,
the Turkestan cotton.
Kautsky does not say one word about the fact that in these conditions,
unprecedented for their difficulty, the Russian working class for nearly three
years has been carrying on a heroic struggle against its enemies on a front of
8,000 versts; that the Russian working class learned how to exchange its hammer
for the sword, and created a mighty army; that for this army it mobilized its
exhausted industry and, in spite of the ruin of the country, which the
executioners of the whole world had condemned to blockade and civil war, for
three years with its own forces and resources it has been clothing, feeding,
arming, transporting an army of millions--an army which has learned how to
conquer.
About all these conditions Kautsky is silent, in a book devoted to Russian

Communism. And his silence is the fundamental, capital, principal lie--true, a
passive lie, but more criminal and more repulsive than the active lie of all the
scoundrels of the international bourgeois Press taken together.
Slandering the policy of the Communist Party, Kautsky says nowhere what he
himself wants and what he proposes. The Bolsheviks were not alone in the arena
of the Russian Revolution. We saw and see in it--now in power, now in
opposition--S.R.s (not less than five groups and tendencies), Mensheviks (not
less than three tendencies), Plekhanovists, Maximalists, Anarchists.... Absolutely
all the "shades of Socialism" (to speak in Kautsky's language) tried their hand,
and showed what they would and what they could. There are so many of these
"shades" that it is difficult now to pass the blade of a knife between them. The
very origin of these "shades" is not accidental: they represent, so to speak,
different degrees in the adaptation of the pre-revolutionary Socialist parties and
groups to the conditions of the greater revolutionary epoch. It would seem that
Kautsky had a sufficiently complete political keyboard before him to be able to
strike the note which would give a true Marxian key to the Russian Revolution.
But Kautsky is silent. He repudiates the Bolshevik melody that is unpleasant to
his ear, but does not seek another. The solution is simple: the old musician
refuses altogether to play on the instrument of the revolution.
10
IN PLACE OF AN EPILOGUE
This book appears at the moment of the Second Congress of the Communist
International. The revolutionary movement of the proletariat has made, during
the months that have passed since the First Congress, a great step forward. The
positions of the official, open social-patriots have everywhere been undermined.
The ideas of Communism acquire an ever wider extension. Official dogmatized
Kautskianism has been gradually compromised. Kautsky himself, within that
"Independent" Party which he created, represents to-day a not very authoritative

and a fairly ridiculous figure.
None the less, the intellectual struggle in the ranks of the international working
class is only now blazing up as it should. If, as we just said, dogmatized
Kautskianism is breathing its last days, and the leaders of the intermediate
Socialist parties are hastening to renounce it, still Kautskianism as a bourgeois
attitude, as a tradition of passivity, as political cowardice, still plays an
enormous part in the upper ranks of the working-class organizations of the
world, in no way excluding parties tending to the Third International, and even
formally adhering to it.
The Independent Party in Germany, which has written on its banner the
watchword of the dictatorship of the proletariat, tolerates in its ranks the Kautsky
group, all the efforts of which are devoted theoretically to compromise and
misrepresent the dictatorship of the proletariat in the shape of its living
expression--the Soviet regime. In conditions of civil war, such a form of
co-habitation is conceivable only and to such an extent as far and as long as the
dictatorship of the proletariat represents for the leaders of the "Independent"
Social-Democracy a noble aspiration, a vague protest against the open and
disgraceful treachery of Noske, Ebert, Scheidemann and others, and--last but not
least--a weapon of electoral and parliamentary demagogy.
The vitality of vague Kautskianism is most clearly seen in the example of the
French Longuetists. Jean Longuet himself has most sincerely convinced himself,
and has for long been attempting to convince others, that he is marching in step
with us, and that only Clemenceau's censorship and the calumnies of our French
friends Loriot, Monatte, Rosmer, and others hinder our comradship in arms. Yet
is it sufficient to make oneself acquainted with any parliamentary speech of
Longuet's to realize that the gulf separating him from us at the present moment is
possibly still wider than at the first period of the imperialist war? The
revolutionary problems now arising before the international proletariat have
become more serious, more immediate, more gigantic, more direct, more
definite, than five or six years ago; and the politically reactionary character of
the Longuetists, the parliamentary representatives of eternal passivity, has
become more impressive than ever before, in spite of the fact that formally they
have returned to the fold of parliamentary opposition.
The Italian Party, which is within the Third International, is not at all free from
Kautskianism. As far as the leaders are concerned, a very considerable part of
them bear their internationalist honors only as a duty and as an imposition from
below. In 1914-1915, the Italian Socialist Party found it infinitely more easy
than did the other European parties to maintain an attitude of opposition to the
war, both because Italy entered the war nine months later than other countries,
and particularly because the international position of Italy created in it even a
powerful bourgeois group (Giolittians in the widest sense of the word) which
remained to the very last moment hostile to Italian intervention in the war.
These conditions allowed the Italian Socialist Party, without the fear of a very
profound internal crisis to refuse war credits to the Government, and generally to
remain outside the interventionist block. But by this very fact the process of
internal cleansing of the party proved to be unquestionably delayed. Although an
integral part of the Third International, the Italian Socialist Party to this very day
can put up with Turati and his supporters in its ranks. This very powerful
group--unfortunately we find it difficult to define to any extent of accuracy its
numerical significance in the parliamentary group, in the press, in the party, and
in the trade union organizations--represents a less pedantic, not so demagogic,
more declamatory and lyrical, but none the less malignant opportunism--a form
of romantic Kautskianism.
A passive attitude to the Kautskian, Longuetist, Turatist groups is usually

cloaked by the argument that the time for revolutionary activity in the respective
countries has not yet arrived. But such a formulation of the question is absolutely
false. Nobody demands from Socialists striving for Communism that they should
appoint a revolutionary outbreak for a definite week or month in the near future.
What the Third International demands of its supporters is a recognition, not in
words but in deeds, that civilized humanity has entered a revolutionary epoch;
that all the capitalist countries are speeding towards colossal disturbances and an
open class war; and that the task of the revolutionary representatives of the
proletariat is to prepare for that inevitable and approaching war the necessary
spiritual armory and buttress of organization. The internationalists who consider
it possible at the present time to collaborate with Kautsky, Longuet and Turati,
to appear side by side with them before the working masses, by that very act
renounce in practice the work of preparing in ideas and organization for the
revolutionary rising of the proletariat, independently of whether it comes a
month or a year sooner or later. In order that the open rising of the proletarian
masses should not fritter itself away in belated searches for paths and leadership,
we must see to it to-day that wide circles of the proletariat should even now
learn to grasp all the immensity of the tasks before them, and of their
irreconcilability with all variations of Kautskianism and opportunism.
A truly revolutionary, i.e., a Communist wing, must set itself up in opposition, in

face of the masses, to all the indecisive, half-hearted groups of doctrinaires,
advocates, and panegyrists of passivity, strengthening its positions first of all
spiritually and then in the sphere of organization--open, half-open, and purely
conspirative. The moment of formal split with the open and disguised
Kautskians, or the moment of their expulsion from the ranks of the
working-class party, is, of course, to be determined by considerations of
usefulness from the point of view of circumstances; but all the policy of real
Communists must turn in that direction.
That is why it seems to me that this book is still not out of date--to my great
regret, if not as an author, at any rate as a Communist.
June 17, 1920.
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Dictatorship vs. Democracy, by Leon Trotsky
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Dictatorship vs.

Democracy, by Leon Trotsky 1

Dictatorship vs. Democracy, by Leon

Title: Dictatorship vs. Democracy (Terrorism and Communism)

Author: Leon Trotsky

Release Date: February 25, 2012 [EBook #38982]

Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DICTATORSHIP

WORKERS PARTY LIBRARY, Vol. I

DICTATORSHIP vs. DEMOCRACY

(TERRORISM AND COMMUNISM)

A Reply to Karl Kautsky by LEON TROTSKY

With a Preface by H. N. BRAILSFORD and Foreword by Max Bedact

[Illustration: WORKERS PARTY OF AMERICA. WORKERS OF THE

Published 1922 by WORKERS PARTY OF AMERICA 799 Broadway, Room

THE BALANCE OF POWER 12

THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT 20

THE PARIS COMMUNE AND SOVIET RUSSIA 69

MARX AND ... KAUTSKY 91

THE WORKING CLASS AND ITS SOVIET POLICY 98

PROBLEMS OF THE ORGANIZATION OF LABOR 128

KARL KAUTSKY, HIS SCHOOL AND HIS BOOK 177

IN PLACE OF AN EPILOGUE 188

In a land where "democracy" is so deeply entrenched as in our United States of

"Dictatorship versus Democracy" is, therefore, enough of an open question even

This book is an answer to a book by Karl Kautsky, "Terrorism and

Anyhow, to read Kautsky's book is an ordeal for any revolutionist. Kautsky, in

Kautsky's book "Terrorism and Communism" is dictated by hatred of the

from the Russian Gallifets, the Kolchaks, Wrangels, etc.

Trotsky's book is not only an answer to Karl Kautsky; it is an answer to the

vindicate itself against the dull trend of impersonal forces.

Dictatorship vs. Democracy

True, we live in the midst of a very difficult period of economic

The transition from feudal economy to bourgeois society--a step of gigantic

society, in order, in the process of the struggle itself, to create an actually

Unfortunately, yes. Ideology, by its very essence, plays in the Socialist

Moscow, May 29, 1920.

Dictatorship vs. Democracy

A Reply to Karl Kautsky

THE BALANCE OF POWER

What is this balance of power after all--that sacramental formula which is to

financial oligarchy. Most frequently, it means that summary political impression

According to Friedrich Adler, the establishment of a Soviet dictatorship in

However, even here it is permissible to ask: Does the policy of Clemenceau

extraordinarily behind the development of its productive forces. The lower

The political worshippers of routine, incapable of surveying the historical

change, as a colossal obstacle in the path of historical development. To-day it is

The great forces of production--that shock factor in historical

In this way the cause of the misfortunes at present experienced by humanity is

that the development of productive forces, outgrowing the framework of the

THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT

The dictatorship is necessary because it is a case, not of partial changes, but of

Abandoning the idea of a revolutionary dictatorship, Kautsky transforms the

political strike is a form of extra-parliamentary pressure on the "national will,"

The man who repudiates terrorism in principle--i.e., repudiates measures of

[2] Translator's Note--For convenience sake, the references throughout have

Kautsky, however, seems to make a little concession in this direction. "True," he

importance only as a preliminary to a conflict between the proletariat and the

No one, of course, attempted to reckon up beforehand the number of victims that