Page:Karl Radek - Proletarian Dictatorship and Terrorism - tr. Patrick Lavin (1921).djvu/51

44 Only after that was it possible to secure the general proletarian organs of control should be built, and_control of individual factories taken out of the hands of individual workers' councils. Finally, it succeeded in introducing, not only the extension of production in general, but also the direction in the interests of all, of the production of everything needed by society. Kautsky has not the smallest idea of the colossal work that has been accomplished in this sphere since the first days of the November Revolution. The struggle for peace, the German attack, the fight against the operations immediately set on foot by the militarist counter-revolution, the spontaneous demobilization of the army, the building up of the most primitive organs of State power—these problems, which confronted the proletariat and their party, were such that the ordinary professor, in his study amongst his books, cannot have the slightest conception of. But from Lenin's speech on the problems of the Soviet power, which was published in April, 1918, in the fifteenth month of the revolution, every thinking person can see that the proposals were not the invention of a man living in the clouds, but the attitude of a great proletarian leader to the problems with which practically the whole of Russia was already grappling in the first weeks of the Revolution. Lenin's pamphlet is polemical through and through. It was directed against the Left Wing of the Communist Party of Russia, which was grouped round the periodical, the "Communist" published in Moscow under the direction of Bucharin, Radek, Ossinski, Lomov and Smirnov. The whole party was unanimous on the point that the question of the organization of production was the most important domestic question of the Revolution. Both wings were agreed on what Kautsky now serves up to the Communists as a brand-new discovery that "without the cooperation of the intelligentzia, Socialism at the present stage of production cannot be accomplished." The Russian Communists have never told the workers that they could direct production without expert knowledge, or that they could acquire this knowledge so rapidly that they would be able to do without the intellectual capital