Page:Karl Radek - Proletarian Dictatorship and Terrorism - tr. Patrick Lavin (1921).djvu/18

11 And thus is Marx pressed into the service of the counter-revolution. Frederick Engels, writing in 1890 of the demonstrations then being held in Europe and America in favor of an eight-hour working day, and commenting on the fact that the proletarians of all lands were indeed united, said wistfully, "Were Marx but with me to see it with his own eyes!" It was an interesting, if unprofitable, occupation to speculate on what Engels would have said on hearing of such a perversion of Marx as Kautsky and his imitators have been guilty of.

It is when one considers cases of this kind that one turns eagerly, if somewhat irrationally, to solutions such as the pathological one already referred to. The author of this pamphlet, however, has no faith in theories of this kind, as the reader will discover before he has read very many pages.

In answer to Kautsky's condemnation of the Bolsheviks for using violence against their opponents, Radek cites some of the bloody deeds of the ruling classes in their all too successful attempts to crush the workers. Like most people who know something of the horrors perpetrated upon working classes and subject nations by their rulers since the far off days when the suppression of a workers' rebellion was signalized by the crucifixion, along the great military highways of the Roman Empire, of captured slaves, whose writhing bodies were intended to have a deterrent effect upon any who dared to think of interfering with the "rights of private property," down to the cowardly butchery of the dying James Connolly and his gallant comrades, and the massacres of the Russian workers by the hirelings of Entente Capitalism—like most such people Karl Radek has little patience with men like Kautsky who condemn the victorious Russian workers for employing "terrorist methods." The cowardly subterfuge that violence is indefensible, at all times and under all circumstances, is not calculated to disturb the capitalist governments of the world, which have no intention of scrapping their armies and their navies and their air fleets, and which