Page:Karl Radek - Proletarian Dictatorship and Terrorism - tr. Patrick Lavin (1921).djvu/24

17 into increasing antagonism to the peasants, the middlemen, the rich people—to all those elements, in short, which were most favored by private property in the means of production, whose abolition by the domination of small industry was impossible." "As it was impossible for them to alter the process of production they attempted, by their machinery of power, to distribute the products of that process by means with which we in our own time have become all to familiar: high prices, compulsory loans which roughly correspond to our payments for purposes of defense, and similar impositions which did not work less misery then than now with the then system of widely scattered production, the paucity of statistics, and the weakness of the central authority as against the districts. The contradiction between the political power of the proletariat and their poor economic position became more and more marked. The affliction caused by the war was thereby rendered more acute. And in despair the rulers of the proletariat more and more rapidly adopted extreme measures and ended with a bloody terror." But as on the basis of private property during the war with its immense operations a new bourgeoisie was bound to arise, while want and the war exhausted the masses, the policy of terror necessarily ended with the defeat of Termidor. And yet again: the illusion that men can introduce the "general well-being" had led the proletariat and their leaders to adopt the policy of terrorism, has "befooled" the proletariat and "reduced them to savagery" "without bringing them one step nearer freedom"—that is the "lucid" examination of the epoch of the Jacobin Terror by the leading theorist of the Second International.

But what was the actual state of affairs? First of all Robespierre, St. Just and the other leading men of the "Mountain" did not represent the proletariat at all and did not even desire to represent them. The party of the proletariat and of the proletarian petit-bourgeoisie was represented by Roux, Varlet, Dolivet, Chalier, Seclerc, and other bearers of the Communist agitation who were fought in the fiercest manner and ultimately sent to the guillotine by the "Mountain" and