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
Two or three times a year our party mobilizes a high proportion of its
numbers for the front. Scattered over a distance of 8,000 versts, they
die and teach others to die. And when, in hungry and cold Moscow,
which has given the flower of its workers to the front, a Party Week
is proclaimed, there pour into our ranks from the proletarian masses,
in the space of seven days, 15,000 persons. And at what moment? At the
moment when the danger of the destruction of the Soviet Government had
reached its most acute point. At the moment when Orel had been taken,
and Denikin was approaching Tula and Moscow, when Yudenich was
threatening Petrograd. At that most painful moment, the Moscow
proletariat, in the course of a week, gave to the ranks of our party
15,000 men, who only waited a new mobilization for the front. And it
can be said with certainty that never yet, with the exception of the
week of the November rising in 1917, was the Moscow proletariat so
single-minded in its revolutionary enthusiasm, and in its readiness
for devoted struggle, as in those most difficult days of peril and
self-sacrifice.
When our party proclaimed the watchword of Subbotniks and Voskresniks
(Communist Saturdays and Sundays), the revolutionary idealism of the
proletariat found for itself a striking expression in the shape of
voluntary labor. At first tens and hundreds, later thousands, and now
tens and hundreds of thousands of workers every week give up several
hours of their labor without reward, for the sake of the economic
reconstruction of the country. And this is done by half-starved
people, in torn boots, in dirty linen--because the country has neither
boots nor soap. Such, in reality, is that Bolshevik proletariat to
whom Kautsky recommends a course of self-sacrifice. The facts of the
situation, and their relative importance, will appear still more
vividly before us if we recall that all the egoist, bourgeois,
coarsely selfish elements of the proletariat--all those who avoid
service at the front and in the Subbotniks, who engage in speculation
and in weeks of starvation incite the workers to strikes--all of them
vote at the Soviet elections for the Mensheviks; that is, for the
Russian Kautskies.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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