Dictatorship vs. Democracy (Terrorism and Communism): a reply to Karl Kantsky — Kant — John Shaqi
Dictatorship vs. Democracy (Terrorism and Communism): a reply to Karl Kantsky
Kant · en
to the military, realizing that the common interest demanded this.
Part went against their will. These were compelled.
Naturally, it is quite clear that the State must, by means of the
bonus system, give the better workers better conditions of existence.
But this not only does not exclude, but on the contrary pre-supposes,
that the State and the trade unions--without which the Soviet State
will not build up industry--acquire new rights of some kind over the
worker. The worker does not merely bargain with the Soviet State: no,
he is subordinated to the Soviet State, under its orders in every
direction--for it is _his_ State.
"If," Abramovich says, "we were simply told that it is a question of
industrial discipline, there would be nothing to quarrel about; but
why introduce militarization?" Of course, to a considerable extent,
the question is one of the discipline of the trade unions; but of the
new discipline of new, _Productional_, trade unions. We live in a
Soviet country, where the working class is in power--a fact which our
Kautskians do not understand. When the Menshevik Rubtzov said that
there remained only the fragment of the trade union movement in my
report, there was a certain amount of truth in it. Of the trade
unions, as he understands them--that is to say, trade unions of the
old craft type--there in reality has remained very little; but the
industrial productional organization of the working class, in the
conditions of Soviet Russia, has the very greatest tasks before it.
What tasks? Of course, not the tasks involved in a struggle with the
State, in the name of the interests of labor; but tasks involved in
the construction, side by side with the State, of Socialist economy.
Such a form of union is in principle a new organization, which is
distinct, not only from the trade unions, but also from the
revolutionary industrial unions in bourgeois society, just as the
supremacy of the proletariat is distinct from the supremacy of the
bourgeoisie. The productional union of the ruling working class no
longer has the problems, the methods, the discipline, of the union for
struggle of an oppressed class. All our workers are _obliged_ to
enter the unions. The Mensheviks are against this. This is quite
comprehensible, because in reality they are against the
_dictatorship of the proletariat_. It is to this, in the long
run, that the whole question is reduced. The Kautskians are against
the dictatorship of the proletariat, and are thereby against all its
consequences. Both economic and political compulsion are only forms of
the expression of the dictatorship of the working class in two closely
connected regions. True, Abramovich demonstrated to us most learnedly
that under Socialism there will be no compulsion, that the principle
of compulsion contradicts Socialism, that under Socialism we shall be
moved by the feeling of duty, the habit of working, the attractiveness
of labor, etc., etc. This is unquestionable. Only this unquestionable