Dictatorship vs. Democracy (Terrorism and Communism): a reply to Karl Kantsky
Kant · en
At different times the bourgeoisie combined the red-hot irons of
repression in different proportions with methods of moral influence,
and, first of all, the teaching of the priest. As early as the
sixteenth century, it reformed the old religion of Catholicism, which
defended the feudal order, and adapted for itself a new religion in
the form of the Reformation, which combined the free soul with free
trade and free labor. It found for itself new priests, who became the
spiritual shop-assistants, pious counter-jumpers of the bourgeoisie.
The school, the press, the market-place, and parliament were adapted
by the bourgeoisie for the moral fashioning of the working-class.
Different forms of wages--day-wages, piece wages, contract and
collective bargaining--all these are merely changing methods in the
hands of the bourgeoisie for the labor mobilization of the
proletariat. To this there are added all sorts of forms for
encouraging labor and exciting ambition. Finally, the bourgeoisie
learned how to gain possession even of the trade unions--_i.e._,
the organizations of the working class itself; and it made use of them
on a large scale, particularly in Great Britain, to discipline the
workers. It domesticated the leaders, and with their help inoculated
the workers with the fiction of the necessity for peaceful organic
labor, for a faultless attitude to their duties, and for a strict
execution of the laws of the bourgeois State. The crown of all this
work is Taylorism, in which the elements of the scientific
organization of the process of production are combined with the most
concentrated methods of the system of sweating.
From all that has been said above, it is clear that the productivity
of freely-hired labor is not something that appeared all at once,
perfected, presented by history on a salver. No, it was the result of
a long and stubborn policy of repression, education, organization, and
encouragement, applied by the bourgeoisie in its relations with the
working class. Step by step it learned to squeeze out of the workers
ever more and more of the products of labor; and one of the most
powerful weapons in its hand turned out to be the proclamation of free
hiring as the sole free, normal, healthy, productive, and saving form
of labor.
A legal form of labor which would of its own virtue guarantee its
productivity has not been known in history, and cannot be known. The
legal superstructure of labor corresponds to the relations and current
ideas of the epoch. The productivity of labor is developed, on the
basis of the development of technical forces, by labor education, by
the gradual adaptation of the workers to the changed methods of
production and the new form of social relations.