Page:Karl Radek - Proletarian Dictatorship and Terrorism - tr. Patrick Lavin (1921).djvu/65

58 of people who will on no account take a resolute stand, whose just and honorable feelings impair their power to grasp realities, and who, at a time when violence is required, will shrink from it, and cause much greater sacrifices by this neglect than would otherwise be necessary.

The danger even threatens the proletariat that they will suffer serious temporary defeats through the machinations of unreliable leaders. Those who are acquainted with the history of the Soviet Governments of Hungary and Munich know that the disintegrating influence exercised by romantic youths (of all ages) played an important part in bringing about their downfall; and therefore the influence which Kautsky's book still exercises on some of the leaders of the Independents is a ''danger signal. It warns the proletariat against accepting mere verbal declarations. The independent working masses know that it is not enough to extort from their leaders a confession in favor of dictatorship, that it is necessary to have at the points—boxes on the proletarian railway system, representatives of the revolutionary proletariat whose eyes calmly perceive facts and whose hands do not tremble.'' A Soviet dictatorship with leaders who have not definitely broken mentally with the capitalist world, and who are not prepared to do what hard necessity demands—such a dictatorship can only be a dictatorship in appearance, and that means certain defeat. The proletariat do not long for bloodshed; they know from historical experience that violence or the Terror never at any time nor place created new conditions of production, that it never produced a new system of society where economic development had not prepared the ground for it. The proletariat know that violence does not produce bread or coal, and does not build railways. They know that for that willing labor of millions is necessary, but they also know that if they want coal for their houses and foundries they must first of all win the coal mines in violent revolutionary fighting, and secondly that they must watch over them, sword in hand, to prevent them being destroyed by bands of White