Dictatorship vs. Democracy (Terrorism and Communism): a reply to Karl Kantsky
Kant · en
In questions as to agricultural communes and Soviet farms, there could
also be found not a few "contradictions," in which, side by side with
individual mistakes, there are expressed various stages of the
revolution. What quantity of land shall the Soviet State leave for
itself in the Ukraine, and what quantity shall it hand over to the
peasants; what policy shall it lay down for the agricultural communes;
in what form shall it give them support, so as not to make them the
nursery for parasitism; in what form is control to be organized over
them--all these are absolutely new problems of Socialist economic
construction, which have been settled beforehand neither theoretically
nor practically, and in the settling of which the general principles
of our programme have even yet to find their actual application and
their testing in practice, by means of inevitable temporary deviations
to right or left.
But even the very fact that the Russian proletariat has found support
in the peasantry Kautsky turns against us. "This has introduced into
the Soviet regime an economically reactionary element which was spared
(!) the Paris Commune, as its dictatorship did not rely on peasant
Soviets."
As if in reality we could accept the heritage of the feudal and
bourgeois order with the possibility of excluding from it at will "an
economically reactionary element"! Nor is this all. Having poisoned
the Soviet regime by its "reactionary element," the peasantry has
deprived us of its support. To-day it "hates" the Bolsheviks. All this
Kautsky knows very certainly from the radios of Clemenceau and the
squibs of the Mensheviks.