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 formulae 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.