Page:Karl Radek - Proletarian Dictatorship and Terrorism - tr. Patrick Lavin (1921).djvu/60



What significance has the question of terrorism for the West European working class? Kautsky, Otto Bauer and Hilferding seek to account for terrorism (which they only discover with the workers' revolution) by the fact that the working class in Russia is only a small percentage of the population. That is the sole reason, they say, why the working class must endeavor to maintain itself in power by means of violence. The European proletariat will not need to do this because they constitute the majority of the population. When they (Kautsky, etc.) inveigh against the Russian Bolshevist terror they do so on the ground that it is their duty to cleanse the Socialist escutcheon from all the blood with which Bolshevism has bespattered it. But the eagerness, nay, the venom, with which Kautsky, Ströbel, Hilferding and Ledebour treat the matter shows that for them there is more at stake than the question whether these great representatives of Socialism could accept responsibility for the poor little Russian workers' revolution. When the Russian workers' revolution won in November, 1917, and when, to the workers of all lands from Berlin and Vienna to New York and San Francisco, the flag of the Soviets appeared as the one under which in future they would fight and conquer, the wavering Socialist elements were concerned chiefly with one aspect of the struggle—the idea of the proletarian dictatorship. The Ströbels and the Kautskys vied with the avowed lackeys of the bourgeoisie in persuading the proletariat that Marx had understood dictatorship to mean merely the domination of the proletariat after they had legally won the majority of the people to Socialism; after they had pledged themselves by law to compensate the brave bourgeoisie to the end of their lives