Page:Karl Radek - Proletarian Dictatorship and Terrorism - tr. Patrick Lavin (1921).djvu/47

40 proletariat to "restore democracy". Since the appearance of that pamphlet over a year ago the war of the Entente and of the Russian counter-revolution appears to have taught Herr Kautsky that if the Soviet dictatorship were overthrown its place would be taken by the dictatorship of the counter-revolution with Czarist generals at its head. On that question he says: "You have attained to power although not in a democratic way. And now, since the fact is accomplished, use your power in a rational manner. Accommodate yourselves to conditions; do not attempt impossible jumps; leave complete Socialization alone: it is impossible in a country so backward, from the point of view of capitalist conditions, as Russia."

What is "complete Socialization"? If the words have any meaning at all they can only mean the immediate transference of all means of production to the possession and control of society and the attempt to end Capitalism with one blow. It shows absolute ignorance of the real course of the development of the Russian Revolution for anyone to assert that the Communist Party had on its program a demand for such complete Socialization, or that the Workers' Government had sought, on doctrinaire grounds, to realize it. The Communist Party fought during the Kerensky regime for the control of industry through Workers' Councils with full knowledge of the fact that the proletariat had to acquire an insight into the working of industry—to learn how to administer in order gradually to be able to direct the industrial machine. When Kautsky says that "therefore the proletariat must previously have acquired qualities which will enable them to direct production when they take possession of it," he gives a very simple and school-master like presentation of an extremely complicated process. We cannot, of course, direct a process we do not understand. In capitalist society not only the mass of manual workers in the factories, but even the intellectual proletariat (technicians, engineers, etc.) are destitute of the ability to direct industry. Each one performs a part of the