Dictatorship vs. Democracy (Terrorism and Communism): a reply to Karl KantskyTrotsky, Leon
Philosophy
Dictatorship vs. Democracy (Terrorism and Communism): a reply to Karl Kantsky
Trotsky, Leon
Communism -- Russia; Kautsky, Karl, 1854-1938. Terrorismus und Kommunismus; Revolutions
If, in the first period of the Soviet revolution, the principal
accusation of the bourgeois world was directed against our savagery
and blood-thirstiness, later, when that argument, from frequent use,
had become blunted, and had lost its force, we were made responsible
chiefly for the economic disorganization of the country. In harmony
with his present mission, Kautsky methodically translates into the
language of pseudo-Marxism all the bourgeois charges against the
Soviet Government of destroying the industrial life of Russia. The
Bolsheviks began socialization without a plan. They socialized what
was not ready for socialization. The Russian working class,
altogether, is not yet prepared for the administration of industry;
and so on, and so on.
Repeating and combining these accusations, Kautsky, with dull
obstinacy, hides the real cause for our economic disorganization: the
imperialist slaughter, the civil war, and the blockade.
Soviet Russia, from the first months of its existence, found itself
deprived of coal, oil, metal, and cotton. First the Austro-German and
then the Entente imperialisms, with the assistance of the Russian
White Guards, tore away from Soviet Russia the Donetz coal and
metal-working region, the oil districts of the Caucasus, Turkestan
with its cotton, Ural with its richest deposits of metals, Siberia
with its bread and meat. The Donetz area had usually supplied our
industry with 94 per cent. of its coal and 74 per cent. of its crude
ore. The Ural supplied the remaining 20 per cent. of the ore and 4 per
cent. of the coal. Both these regions, during the civil war, were cut
off from us. We were deprived of half a milliard poods of coal
imported from abroad. Simultaneously, we were left without oil: the
oilfields, one and all, passed into the hands of our enemies. One
needs to have a truly brazen forehead to speak, in face of these
facts, of the destructive influence of "premature," "barbarous," etc.,
socialization. An industry which is completely deprived of fuel and
raw materials--whether that industry belongs to a capitalist trust or
to the Labor State, whether its factories be socialized or not--its
chimneys will not smoke in either case without coal or oil. Something
might be learned about this, say, in Austria; and for that matter
in Germany itself. A weaving factory administered according to the
best Kautskian methods--if we admit that anything at all can be
administered by Kautskian methods, except one's own inkstand--will not
produce prints if it is not supplied with cotton. And we were
simultaneously deprived both of Turkestan and American cotton. In
addition, as has been pointed out, we had no fuel.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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