Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/406

 the beourgeois specialists for the purpose of re-plowing the soil so that no bourgeoisie may ever grow on it.

This is a peculiar epoch, or rather period of development, and in order definitely to defeat capital, we should be able to adapt the forms of our struggle to the peculiar conditions of the period.

Without the direction of specialists in different branches of science, technique and experience, the transition to Socialism is impossible, for Socialism demands a conscious mass movement toward a higher productivity of labor in comparison with Capitalism and on the basis which has been attained by Capitalism. Socialism must accomplish this movement forward in its own way, by its own methods; we shall be more explicit, by Soviet methods. But the specialists are inevitably bourgeois, on account of the whole environment of social life which made them specialists. If our proletariat, having obtained power, could have rapidly solved the problems of accounting, control and organization on a national scale (this was impossible on account of the war and the backwardness of Russia)—then, having crushed sabotage, we should have obtained through universal accounting and control the complete submission of the bourgeois specialists. In view of the considerable delay in installing a system of accounting and control in general, although we have succeeded in defeating sabotage, we have not yet created an environment which would put at our disposal the bourgeois specialists. Many saboteurs are coming into our service, but the best organizers and the biggest specialists can be gained by the state either in the old bourgeois way (that is for a higher salary) or in the new proletarian way (that is by creating such an environment of universal accounting and control which would inevitably and naturally win the approval and attract the services of specialists). We have now been forced to make use of the old bourgeois method and consent to a very high remuneration for the services of the biggest of the bourgeois specialists. All those who are acquainted wth the facts understand this, but not all give sufficient thought to the significance of such a measure of the proletarian state. It is clear that this measure is a compromise, that it is a defection from the principles of the Paris Commune and of any proletarian rule, which demands the reduction of salaries to the standard of remuneration of the average worker,—principles which demand that "careerism" be fought by deeds, not by words.

Furthermore, it is clear that such a measure is not merely a halt in a certain part and to a certain degree of the offensive against