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
If the parliamentary regime, even in the period of "peaceful," stable
development, was a rather crude method of discovering the opinion of
the country, and in the epoch of revolutionary storm completely lost
its capacity to follow the course of the struggle and the development
of revolutionary consciousness, the Soviet regime, which is more
closely, straightly, honestly bound up with the toiling majority of
the people, does achieve meaning, not in statically reflecting a
majority, but in dynamically creating it. Having taken its stand on
the path of revolutionary dictatorship, the working class of Russia
has thereby declared that it builds its policy in the period of
transition, not on the shadowy art of rivalry with chameleon-hued
parties in the chase for peasant votes, but on the actual attraction
of the peasant masses, side by side with the proletariat, into the
work of ruling the country in the real interests of the laboring
masses. Such democracy goes a little deeper down than parliamentarism.
To-day, when the main problem--the question of life and death--of the
revolution consists in the military repulse of the various attacks of
the White Guard bands, does Kautsky imagine that any form of
parliamentary "majority" is capable of guaranteeing a more energetic,
devoted, and successful organization of revolutionary defence? The
conditions of the struggle are so defined, in a revolutionary country
throttled by the criminal ring of the blockade, that all the
middle-class groups are confronted only with the alternative of
Denikin or the Soviet Government. What further proof is needed when
even parties, which stand for compromise in principle, like the
Mensheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionaries, have split along that
very line?
When suggesting to us the election of a Constituent Assembly, does
Kautsky propose the stopping of the civil war for the purpose of the
elections? By whose decision? If he intends for this purpose to bring
into motion the authority of the Second International, we hasten to
inform him that that institution enjoys in Denikin's camp only a
little more authority than it does in ours. But to the extent that the
civil war between the Workers' and Peasants' Army and the imperialist
bands is still going on, the elections must of necessity be limited to
Soviet territory. Does Kautsky desire to insist that we should allow
the parties which support Denikin to come out into the open? Empty and
contemptible chatter! There is not one government, at any time and
under any conditions, which would allow its enemies to mobilize
hostile forces in the rear of its armies.