Page:Karl Radek - Proletarian Dictatorship and Terrorism - tr. Patrick Lavin (1921).djvu/48

41 work: they are all little wheels in an intricate mechanism. The management is in the hands of a few directors who carefully guard their secrets (market conditions, etc.). As long as capital rules it seeks to exclude the proletarian by every means from the direction of industry. When the proletariat, however, come to power, without the capacity to manage, they will be faced with the necessity to do so; not only because the struggle for power will have induced in them the will to take their fate in their own hands, but also because the capitalists, in the struggle for power, will injure production by measures of sabotage and all other means, in order to make the position of the proletariat as difficult as possible. How is such a situation to be met? Kautsky, Hilferding and Bauer believed they had found the way when they consented to sit on royal commissions (on which not a single proletarian had a place) and study the "Socialization question." They had first of all to ascertain, in conjunction with capitalist representatives and learned professors, how coal, fisheries, etc., could be nationalized, one after another, without injury to "production." Then they came to the conviction that the occasion of sabotage and civil war should be taken from the capitalists by giving them handsome compensation. Later, when matters reach a crisis, this compensation can be gradually taxed out of existence. Contemporaneously with the gradual nationalization of the most highly centralized and most easily conducted industries, their directing boards should cease to be of a purely private capitalist nature and become mixed bodies, having representatives of the State, the consumers and the workers, besides those of the capitalists. A two-fold object will thus be secured: in the first place, the workers will gradually acquire an insight into the work of management; and in the second place, the continuity of production will be secured. This is the standpoint from which Kautsky criticizes the economic policy of the Soviet Government.

Before we describe the Russian development let us ask if this viewpoint has been proved to be correct in Germany and