Dictatorship vs. Democracy (Terrorism and Communism): a reply to Karl Kantsky

Оглавление

Trotsky Leon. Dictatorship vs. Democracy (Terrorism and Communism): a reply to Karl Kantsky

Foreword

PREFACE

Introduction

1. The Balance of Power

2. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat

3. Democracy

4. Terrorism

5. The Paris Commune and Soviet Russia

6. Marx and … Kautsky

7. The Working Class and Its Soviet Policy

8. Problems of the Organization of Labor

9. Karl Kautsky, His School and His Book

10. In Place of an Epilogue

Отрывок из книги

It has been said of the Bolsheviks that they are more interesting than Bolshevism. To those who hold to the economic interpretation of history that may seem a heresy. None the less, I believe that the personality not merely of the leaders but also of their party goes far to explain the making and survival of the Russian Revolution. To us in the West they seem a wholly foreign type. With Socialist leaders and organizations we and our fathers have been familiar for three-quarters of a century. There has been no lack of talent and even of genius among them. The movement has produced its great theorist in Marx, its orator in Jaurès, its powerful tacticians like Bebel, and it has influenced literature in Morris, Anatole France and Shaw. It bred, however, no considerable man of action, and it was left for the Russians to do what generations of Western Socialists had spent their lives in discussing. There was in this Russian achievement an almost barbaric simplicity and directness. Here were man who really believed the formulæ of our theorists and the resolutions of our Congresses. What had become for us a sterilized and almost respectable orthodoxy rang to their ears as a trumpet call to action. The older generation has found it difficult to pardon their sincerity. The rest of us want to understand the miracle.

The real audacity of the Bolsheviks lay in this, that they made a proletarian revolution precisely in that country which, of all portions of the civilized world, seemed the least prepared for it by its economic development. For an agrarian revolt, for the subdivision of the soil, even for the overthrow of the old governing class, Russia was certainly ready. But any spontaneous revolution, with its foundations laid in the masses of the peasantry, would have been individualistic and not communistic. The daring of the Bolsheviks lay in their belief that the minute minority of the urban working class could, by its concentration, its greater intelligence and its relative capacity for organization, dominate the inert peasant mass, and give to their outbreak of land-hunger the character and form of a constructive proletarian revolution. The bitter struggle among Russian parties which lasted from March, 1917, down to the defeat of Wrangel in November, 1920, was really an internecine competition among them for the leadership of the peasants. Which of these several groups could enlist their confidence, to the extent of inducing them not merely to fight, but to accept the discipline, military and civilian, necessary for victory? At the start the Bolsheviks had everything against them. They are nearly all townsmen. They talked in terms of a foreign and very German doctrine. Few of them, save Lenin, grasped the problems of rural life at all. The landed class should at least have known the peasant better. Their chief rivals were the Social Revolutionaries, a party which from its first beginnings had made a cult of the Russian peasant, studied him, idealized him and courted him, which even seemed in 1917 to have won him. Many circumstances explain the success of the Bolsheviks, who proved once again in history the capacity of the town, even when its population is relatively minute, for swift and concentrated action. They also had the luck to deal with opponents who committed the supreme mistake of invoking foreign aid. But none of these advantages would have availed without an immense superiority of character. The Slav temperament, dreamy, emotional, undisciplined, showed itself at its worst in the incorrigible self-indulgence of the more aristocratic "Whites," while the "intellectuals" of the moderate Socialist and Liberal groups have been ruined for action by their exclusively literary and æsthetic education. The Bolsheviks may be a less cultivated group, but, in their underground life of conspiracy, they had learned sobriety, discipline, obedience, and mutual confidence. Their rigid dogmatic Marxist faith gives to them the power of action which belongs only to those who believe without criticism or question. Their ability to lead depends much less than most Englishmen suppose, on their ruthlessness and their readiness to practise the arts of intimidation and suppression. Their chief asset is their self-confidence. In every emergency they are always sure that they have the only workable plan. They stand before the rest of Russia as one man. They never doubt or despair, and even when they compromise, they do it with an air of truculence. Their survival amid invasion, famine, blockade, and economic collapse has been from first to last a triumph of the unflinching will and the fanatical faith. They have spurred a lazy and demoralized people to notable feats of arms and to still more astonishing feats of endurance. To hypnotize a nation in this fashion is, perhaps, the most remarkable feat of the human will in modern times.

.....

No one, of course, attempted to reckon up beforehand the number of victims that will be called for by the revolutionary insurrection of the proletariat, and by the regime of its dictatorship. But it was clear to all that the number of victims will vary with the strength of resistance of the propertied classes. If Kautsky desires to say in his book that a democratic upbringing has not weakened the class egoism of the bourgeoisie, this can be admitted without further parley.

If he wishes to add that the imperialist war, which broke out and continued for four years, in spite of democracy, brought about a degradation of morals and accustomed men to violent methods and action, and completely stripped the bourgeoisie of the last vestige of awkwardness in ordering the destruction of masses of humanity – here also he will be right.

.....