Page:Karl Radek - The Development of Socialism from Science to Action.djvu/17

 becoming a stronghold of the capitalistic highwaymen; they criticised very sharply the pseudo-republicanism and the pseudo-democracy of the republican countries, and frequently the question arose, "How shall capitalistic democracy and its parliamentary agencies be converted into agencies of power of the victorious proletariat?" When Anton Pannekoek, the clearest head of West European Socialism, answered the question by saying, that one must destroy the democratic forms of the capitalistic state and must create new organs of power of the working people in the fires of the proletarian revolution, he was accused by Karl Kautsky, the most authoritative Marxian theoretician, of being an anarchist. However correct the answer of Pannekoek may have been, it was only half an answer. It pointed to the fact that the organs of compulsion used by the capitalist state must be destroyed, but it did not show what organs of control the proletariat must build in order to carry on and assure its victory.

While the majority of even the revolutionary Socialists saw in democracy the means by which Socialism would gain the victory, the Syndicalists, representing the revolutionary theory of those countries in which the bankruptcy of democracy had brought about the complete disillusionment of the masses of the people, pointed to the labor unions as the agency which should win the power and become the wielders of the power of the masses.

This problem, as has been said, was put only sporadically by those intellects who were able to see beyond the confines of the present time and could not by answered by them. The historic solutions are never found by the theoreticians of the working class, they can only be discovered in the revolutionary struggle of the masses; to the theoretician is left only the duty of grasping the practical measures of the proletariat, to make them common knowledge and to make them the universal object of the struggle of the proletariat, the solution of its struggle.

Before the working class could be confronted with the