"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, Clemenceau 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.