Part 18

Abramovich explained to us that a good board is better than a bad manager, that into a good board there must enter a good expert. All this is splendid--only why do not the Mensheviks offer us several hundred boards? I think that the Supreme Economic Council will find sufficient use for them. But we--not observers, but workers--must build from the material at our disposal. We have specialists, we have experts, of whom, shall we say, one-third are conscientious and educated, another third only half-conscientious and half-educated, and the last third are no use at all. In the working class there are many talented, devoted, and energetic people. Some--unfortunately few--have already the necessary knowledge and experience. Some have character and capacity, but have not knowledge or experience. Others have neither one nor the other. Out of this material we have to create our factory and other administrative bodies; and here we cannot be satisfied with general phrases. First of all, we must select all the workers who have already in experience shown that they can direct enterprises, and give such men the possibility of standing on their own feet. Such men themselves ask for one-man management, because the work of controlling a factory is not a school for the backward. A worker who knows his business thoroughly desires to _control_. If he has decided and ordered, his decision must be accomplished. He may be replaced--that is another matter; but while he is the master--the Soviet, proletarian master--he controls the undertaking entirely and completely. If he has to be included in a board of weaker men, who interfere in the administration, nothing will come of it. Such a working-class administrator must be given an expert assistant, one or two according to the enterprise. If there is no suitable working-class administrator, but there is a conscientious and trained expert, we shall put him at the head of an enterprise, and attach to him two or three prominent workers in the capacity of assistants, in such a way that every decision of the expert should be known to the assistants, but that they should not have the right to reverse that decision. They will, step by step, follow the specialist in his work, will learn something, and in six months or a year will thus be able to occupy independent posts.

Abramovich quoted from my own speech the example of the hairdresser who has commanded a division and an army. True! But what, however, Abramovich does not know is that, if our Communist comrades have begun to command regiments, divisions, and armies, it is because previously they were commissaries attached to expert commanders. The responsibility fell on the expert, who knew that, if he made a mistake, he would bear the full brunt, and would not be able to say that he was only an "adviser" or a "member of the board." To-day in our army the majority of the posts of command, particularly in the lower--_i.e._, politically the most important--grades, are filled by workers and foremost peasants. But with what did we begin? We put officers in the posts of command, and attached to them workers as commissaries; and they learned, and learned with success, and learned to beat the enemy.

Comrades, we stand face to face with a very difficult period, perhaps the most difficult of all. To difficult periods in the life of peoples and classes there correspond harsh measures. The further we go the easier things will become, the freer every citizen will feel, the more imperceptible will become the compelling force of the proletarian State. Perhaps we shall then even allow the Mensheviks to have papers, if only the Mensheviks remain in existence until that time. But to-day we are living in the period of dictatorship, political and economic. And the Mensheviks continue to undermine that dictatorship. When we are fighting on the civil front, preserving the revolution from its enemies, and the Menshevik paper writes: "Down with the civil war," we cannot permit this. A dictatorship is a dictatorship, and war is war. And now that we have crossed to the path of the greatest concentration of forces on the field of the economic rebirth of the country, the Russian Kautskies, the Mensheviks, remain true to their counter-revolutionary calling. Their voice, as hitherto, sounds as the voice of doubt and decomposition, of disorganization and undermining, of distrust and collapse.

Is it not monstrous and grotesque that, at this Congress, at which 1,500 representatives of the Russian working class are present, where the Mensheviks constitute less than 5%, and the Communists about 90%, Abramovich should say to us: "Do not be attracted by methods which result in a little band taking the place of the people." "All through the people," says the representative of the Mensheviks, "no guardians of the laboring masses! All through the laboring masses, through their independent activity!" And, further, "It is impossible to convince a class by arguments." Yet look at this very hall: here is that class! The working class is here before you, and with us; and it is just you, an insignificant band of Mensheviks, who are attempting to convince it by bourgeois arguments! It is you who wish to be the guardians of that class. And yet it has its own high degree of independence, and that independence, it has displayed, incidentally, in having overthrown you and gone forward along its own path!

9

KARL KAUTSKY, HIS SCHOOL AND HIS BOOK.

The Austro-Marxian school (Bauer, Renner, Hilferding, Max Adler, Friedrich Adler) in the past more than once was contrasted with the school of Kautsky, as veiled opportunism might be contrasted with true Marxism. This has proved to be a pure historical misunderstanding, which deceived some for a long time, some for a lesser period, but which in the end was revealed with all possible clearness. Kautsky is the founder and the most perfect representative of the Austrian forgery of Marxism. While the real teaching of Marx is the theoretical formula of action, of attack, of the development of revolutionary energy, and of the carrying of the class blow to its logical conclusion, the Austrian school was transformed into an academy of passivity and evasiveness, because of a vulgar historical and conservative school, and reduced its work to explaining and justifying, not guiding and overthrowing. It lowered itself to the position of a hand-maid to the current demands of parliamentarism and opportunism, replaced dialectic by swindling sophistries, and, in the end, in spite of its great play with ritual revolutionary phraseology, became transformed into the most secure buttress of the capitalist State, together with the altar and throne that rose above it. If the latter was engulfed in the abyss, no blame for this can be laid upon the Austro-Marxian school.

What characterizes Austro-Marxism is repulsion and fear in the face of revolutionary action. The Austro-Marxist is capable of displaying a perfect gulf of profundity in the explanation of yesterday, and considerable daring in prophesying concerning to-morrow--but for to-day he never has a great thought or capacity for great action. To-day for him always disappears before the wave of little opportunist worries, which later are explained as the most inevitable link between the past and the future.

The Austro-Marxist is inexhaustible when it is a question of discovering reasons to prevent initiative and render difficult revolutionary action. Austro-Marxism is a learned and boastful theory of passivity and capitulation. Naturally, it is not by accident that it was just in Austria, in that Babylon torn by fruitless national antagonisms, in that State which represented the personified impossibility to exist and develop, that there arose and was consolidated the pseudo-Marxian philosophy of the impossibility of revolutionary action.

The foremost Austrian Marxists represent, each in his own way, a certain "individuality." On various questions they more than once did not see eye to eye. They even had political differences. But in general they are fingers of the same hand.

_Karl Renner_ is the most pompous, solid, and conceited representative of this type. The gift of literary imitation, or, more simply, of stylist forgery, is granted to him to an exceptional extent. His May Day article represented a charming combination of the most revolutionary words. And, as both words and their combinations live, within certain limits, with their own independent life, Renner's articles awakened in the hearts of many workers a revolutionary fire which their author apparently never knew. The tinsel of Austro-Viennese culture, the chase of the external, of title of rank, was more characteristic of Renner than of his other colleagues. In essence he always remained merely an imperial and royal officer, who commanded Marxist phraseology to perfection.

The transformation of the author of the jubilee article on Karl Marx, famous for its revolutionary pathos, into a comic-opera-Chancellor, who expresses his feelings of respect and thanks to the Scandinavian monarchs, is in reality one of the most instructive paradoxes of history.

_Otto Bauer_ is more learned and prosaic, more serious and more boring, than Renner. He cannot be denied the capacity to read books, collect facts, and draw conclusions adapted to the tasks imposed upon him by practical politics, which in turn are guided by others. Bauer has no political will. His chief art is to reply to all acute practical questions by commonplaces. His political thought always lives a parallel life to his will--it is deprived of all courage. His words are always merely the scientific compilation of the talented student of a University seminar. The most disgraceful actions of Austrian opportunism, the meanest servility before the power of the possessing classes on the part of the Austro-German Social-Democracy, found in Bauer their grave elucidator, who sometimes expressed himself with dignity against the form, but always agreed in the essence. If it ever occurred to Bauer to display anything like temperament and political energy, it was exclusively in the struggle against the revolutionary wing--in the accumulation of arguments, facts, quotations, _against_ revolutionary action. His highest period was that (after 1907) in which, being as yet too young to be a deputy, he played the part of secretary of the Social-Democratic group, supplied it with materials, figures, substitutes for ideas, instructed it, drew up memoranda, and appeared almost to be the inspirer of great actions, when in reality he was only supplying substitutes, and adulterated substitutes, for the parliamentary opportunists.

_Max Adler_ represents a fairly ingenuous variety of the Austro-Marxian type. He is a lyric poet, a philosopher, a mystic--a philosophical lyric poet of passivity, as Renner is its publicist and legal expert, as Hilferding is its economist, as Bauer is its sociologist. Max Adler is cramped in a world of three dimensions, although he had found a very comfortable place for himself with the framework of Viennese bourgeois Socialism and the Hapsburg State. The combination of the petty business activity of an attorney and of political humiliation, together with barren philosophical efforts and the cheap tinsel flowers of idealism, have imbued that variety which Max Adler represented with a sickening and repulsive quality.

_Rudolf Hilferding_, a Viennese like the rest, entered the German Social-Democratic Party almost as a mutineer, but as a mutineer of the Austrian stamp, _i.e._, always ready to capitulate without a fight. Hilferding took the external mobility and bustle of the Austrian policy which brought him up for revolutionary initiative; and for a round dozen of months he demanded--true, in the most moderate terms--a more intelligent policy on the part of the leaders of the German Social-Democracy. But the Austro-Viennese bustle swiftly disappeared from his own nature. He soon became subjected to the mechanical rhythm of Berlin and the automatic spiritual life of the German Social-Democracy. He devoted his intellectual energy to the purely theoretical sphere, where he did not say a great deal, true--no Austro-Marxist has ever said a great deal in any sphere--but in which he did, at any rate, write a serious book. With this book on his back, like a porter with a heavy load, he entered the revolutionary epoch. But the most scientific book cannot replace the absence of will, of initiative, of revolutionary instinct and political decision, without which action is inconceivable. A doctor by training, Hilferding is inclined to sobriety, and, in spite of his theoretical education, he represents the most primitive type of empiricist in questions of policy. The chief problem of to-day is for him not to leave the lines laid down for him by yesterday, and to find for this conservative and bourgeois apathy a scientific, economic explanation.

_Friedrich Adler_ is the most balanced representative of the Austro-Marxian type. He has inherited from his father the latter's political temperament. In the petty exhausting struggle with the disorder of Austrian conditions, Friedrich Adler allowed his ironical scepticism finally to destroy the revolutionary foundations of his world outlook. The temperament inherited from his father more than once drove him into opposition to the school created by his father. At certain moments Friedrich Adler might seem the very revolutionary negation of the Austrian school. In reality, he was and remains its necessary coping-stone. His explosive revolutionism foreshadowed acute attacks of despair amidst Austrian opportunism, which from time to time became terrified at its own insignificance.

Friedrich Adler is a sceptic from head to foot: he does not believe in the masses, or in their capacity for action. At the time when Karl Liebknecht, in the hour of supreme triumph of German militarism, went out to the Potsdamerplatz to call the oppressed masses to the open struggle, Friedrich Adler went into a bourgeois restaurant to assassinate there the Austrian Premier. By his solitary shot, Friedrich Adler vainly attempted to put an end to his own scepticism. After that hysterical strain, he fell into still more complete prostration.

The black-and-yellow crew of social-patriotism (Austerlitz, Leitner, etc.) hurled at Adler the terrorist all the abuse of which the cowardly sentiments were capable.

But when the acute period was passed, and the prodigal son returned from his convict prison into his father's house with the halo of a martyr, he proved to be doubly and trebly valuable in that form for the Austrian Social-Democracy. The golden halo of the terrorist was transformed by the experienced counterfeiters of the party into the sounding coin of the demagogue. Friedrich Adler became a trusted surety for the Austerlitzes and Renners in face of the masses. Happily, the Austrian workers are coming less and less to distinguish the sentimental lyrical prostration of Friedrich Adler from the pompous shallowness of Renner, the erudite impotence of Max Adler, or the analytical self-satisfaction of Otto Bauer.

The cowardice in thought of the theoreticians of the Austro-Marxian school has completely and wholly been revealed when faced with the great problems of a revolutionary epoch. In his immortal attempt to include the Soviet system in the Ebert-Noske Constitution, Hilferding gave voice not only to his own spirit but to the spirit of the whole Austro-Marxian school, which, with the approach of the revolutionary epoch, made an attempt to become exactly as much more Left than Kautsky as before the revolution it was more Right. From this point of view, Max Adler's view of the Soviet system is extremely instructive.

The Viennese eclectic philosopher admits the significance of the Soviets. His courage goes so far that he adopts them. He even proclaims them the apparatus of the Social Revolution. Max Adler, of course, is for a social revolution. But not for a stormy, barricaded, terrorist, bloody revolution, but for a sane, economically balanced, legally canonized, and philosophically approved revolution.

Max Adler is not even terrified by the fact that the Soviets infringe the "principle" of the constitutional separation of powers (in the Austrian Social-Democracy there are many fools who see in such an infringement a great defect of the Soviet System!). On the contrary, Max Adler, the trade union lawyer and legal adviser of the social revolution, sees in the concentration of powers even an advantage, which allows the direct expression of the proletarian will. Max Adler is in favor of the direct expression of the proletarian will; but only not by means of the direct seizure of power through the Soviets. He proposes a more solid method. In each town, borough, and ward, the Workers' Councils must "control" the police and other officials, imposing upon them the "proletarian will." What, however, will be the "constitutional" position of the Soviets in the republic of Zeiz, Renner and company? To this our philosopher replies: "The Workers' Councils in the long run will receive as much constitutional power as they acquire by means of their own activity." (_Arbeiterzeitung_, No. 179, July 1, 1919.)

The proletarian Soviets must gradually _grow up_ into the political power of the proletariat, just as previously, in the theories of reformism, all the proletarian organizations had to grow up into Socialism; which consummation, however, was a little hindered by the unforeseen misunderstandings, lasting four years, between the Central Powers and the Entente--and all that followed. It was found necessary to reject the economical programme of a gradual development into Socialism without a social revolution. But, as a reward, there opened the perspective of the gradual development of the Soviets into the social revolution, without an armed rising and a seizure of power.

In order that the Soviets should not sink entirely under the burden of borough and ward problems, our daring legal adviser proposes the propaganda of social-democratic ideas! Political power remains as before in the hands of the bourgeoisie and its assistants. But in the wards and the boroughs the Soviets control the policemen and their assistants. And, to console the working class and at the same time to centralize its thought and will, Max Adler on Sunday afternoons will read lectures on the constitutional position of the Soviets, as in the past he read lectures on the constitutional position of the trade unions.

"In this way," Max Adler promises, "the constitutional regulation of the position of the Workers Councils, and their power and importance, would be guaranteed along the whole line of public and social life; and--without the dictatorship of the Soviets--the Soviet system would acquire as large an influence as it could possibly have even in a Soviet republic. At the same time we should not have to pay for that influence by political storms and economic destruction" (idem). As we see, in addition to all his other qualities, Max Adler remains still in agreement with the Austrian tradition: to make a revolution without quarrelling with his Excellency the Public Prosecutor.

* * * * *

The founder of this school, and its highest authority, is Kautsky. Carefully protecting, particularly after the Dresden party congress and the first Russian Revolution, his reputation as the keeper of the shrine of Marxist orthodoxy, Kautsky from time to time would shake his head in disapproval of the more compromising outbursts of his Austrian school. And, following the example of the late Victor Adler, Bauer, Renner, Hilferding--altogether and each separately--considered Kautsky too pedantic, too inert, but a very reverend and a very useful father and teacher of the church of quietism.

Kautsky began to cause serious mistrust in his own school during the period of his revolutionary culmination, at the time of the first Russian Revolution, when he recognized as necessary the seizure of power by the Russian Social-Democracy, and attempted to inoculate the German working class with his theoretical conclusions from the experience of the general strike in Russia. The collapse of the first Russian Revolution at once broke off Kautsky's evolution along the path of radicalism. The more plainly was the question of mass action in Germany itself put forward by the course of events, the more evasive became Kautsky's attitude. He marked time, retreated, lost his confidence; and the pedantic and scholastic features of his thought more and more became apparent. The imperialist war, which killed every form of vagueness and brought mankind face to face with the most fundamental questions, exposed all the political bankruptcy of Kautsky. He immediately became confused beyond all hope of extrication, in the most simple question of voting the War Credits. All his writings after that period represent variations of one and the same theme: "I and my muddle." The Russian Revolution finally slew Kautsky. By all his previous development he was placed in a hostile attitude towards the November victory of the proletariat. This unavoidably threw him into the camp of the counter-revolution. He lost the last traces of historical instinct. His further writings have become more and more like the yellow literature of the bourgeois market.

Kautsky's book, examined by us, bears in its external characteristics all the attributes of a so-called objective scientific study. To examine the extent of the Red Terror, Kautsky acts with all the circumstantial method peculiar to him. He begins with the study of the social conditions which prepared the great French Revolution, and also the physiological and social conditions which assisted the development of cruelty and humanity throughout the history of the human race. In a book devoted to Bolshevism, in which the whole question is examined in 234 pages, Kautsky describes in detail on what our most remote human ancestor fed, and hazards the guess that, while living mainly on vegetable products, he devoured also insects and possibly a few birds. (See page 122.) In a word, there was nothing to lead us to expect that from such an entirely respectable ancestor--one obviously inclined to vegetarianism--there should spring such descendants as the Bolsheviks. That is the solid scientific basis on which Kautsky builds the question!...

But, as is not infrequent with productions of this nature, there is hidden behind the academic and scholastic cloak a malignant political pamphlet. This book is one of the most lying and conscienceless of its kind. Is it not incredible, at first glance, that Kautsky should gather up the most contemptible stories about the Bolsheviks from the rich table of Havas, Reuter and Wolff, thereby displaying from under his learned night-cap the ears of the sycophant? Yet these disreputable details are only mosaic decorations on the fundamental background of solid, scientific lying about the Soviet Republic and its guiding party.

Kautsky depicts in the most sinister colors our savagery towards the bourgeoisie, which "displayed no tendency to resist."

Kautsky attacks our ruthlessness in connection with the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks, who represent "shades" of Socialism.

KAUTSKY DEPICTS THE SOVIET ECONOMY AS THE CHAOS OF COLLAPSE

Kautsky represents the Soviet workers, and the Russian working class as a whole, as a conglomeration of egoists, loafers, and cowards.