Karl Berngardovich Radek

“ Your praise is a slander alike on Majority and Minority of the Commune, which consisted of comrades-in-arms who had no reason to mutually persecute one another. You falsify history unnecessarily. Should the proletarian revolution in Germany succeed, you have nothing to fear, Herr Kautsky. Although impartial, however good your intentions may be, you are a traitor. You are so harmless that the revolution can allow itself the luxury of giving you your necessary ration of fodder, caterpillars and unfledged birds, so that you may continue to nourish yourself after your senile fashion ”

“ Just because the Social Revolution must transform the entire economic system of Capitalism, which gave to one class unheard-of privileges, it must necessarily arouse the strongest opposition of this class, an opposition which can only be broken by the use of guns. And the stronger Capitalism is developed in a country, just so much more ruthless, just so much wilder will the defensive struggle be, just so much bloodier the proletarian revolution, and just so much more ruthless the measures by means of which the victorious working class will hold down the defeated capitalist class. ”

“ In the process of the Socialist revolution they will always seek to discover whether this or that section of the bourgeoisie can be induced to join with them in the exercise of power, whether the circle of those possessing equal rights is not capable of extension, and they will greet the day with ringing of bells and shouts of joy in which all chains will disappear, in which an end will be put to all forms of oppression, in which the long standing disgrace of exploitation of man by man will be driven from the world and consigned to oblivion ”

“ Should the leaders of the workers' organizations decide upon the strike if parliamentary action should fail, if the enemy through his reckless policy should drive the masses to despair—should it be a pistol, then, held in readiness to back up the parliamentary struggle, or should it be the actual mode of the struggle itself, emerging spontaneously out of the increasingly acute class conflicts, prepared not in the conference chambers of the leaders but preparing every hour in the shops and in the factory prisons—not only through the growing agitation, the stimulated action of the proletariat. ”

“ If Kautsky in his pamphlet on Democracy and Dictatorship believed it was necessary to convert Lenin from the opinion that the seizure of factories by the workers in these factories, is not Socialism—that merely shows the professors stupidity. So long as there is no organ which represents all the workers' interests; so long as the fighting organs of individual proletarian groups are merely in process of formation—just so long is it impossible for the object of the struggle to be common. ”

“ The European proletariat will, without doubt, march forward so quickly in the near future that it will not have time to learn the experiences of the Russian Revolution out of learned books, but it will learn them practically, before it is in a position to learn them out of the documents of the Revolution. We, who have the immeasurable good fortune after four years of horror, the horror of the world war, to be living, that is, to be fighting, in the midst of a newly created society, we do not flatter ourselves that we can be the teachers of the international proletariat. ”

“ From San Francisco to Vladivostok, whether one goes by way of the Atlantic or the Pacific, from all points of the world we are receiving proofs daily of the fact that in spite of the lies of the bourgeois press, in spite of the cowardice of the traitors to Socialism, the workers of all countries, when they are just beginning to stir, or just feeling the desire for the struggle, turn their eyes to blood-drenched Russia, to that Russia in which the working class is battling with a world of foes, and, as we hope, to conquer. ”

“ As long as the process of revolution is still unfinished, as long as no Socialist order appears in the place of the capitalist chaos—order which will show to the masses by concrete acts the benefits of the conditions resulting from the new rule—so long will the bourgeoisie find elements amongst the wavering and vacillating portions of the proletariat and the petit-bourgeoisie which will allow themselves to be persuaded that under bourgeois rule they would be spared all the difficulties and hardships inseperable from the struggle. ”

“ He who comes from the camp of the bourgeoisie and does not possess sufficient courage and capacity for sacrifice to write definitely with the proletariat and destroy the bridges behind him—such a one will, despite all his sympathy for the proletariat, be found on the side of the enemies of the people, when a decisive moment comes." These are the words of Karl Kautsky, who thus showed he had a presentiment of what would happen to himself. The quiet comfortable study is the bridge which unites him with the bourgeoisie. ”

“ The most active, a minority, rises, accomplishes the Revolution, and its success depends upon whether this Revolution follows the line of historic development, that is whether it responds to the needs of the masses, who can then sever themselves from the former ruling class. The creative and dynamic force of the Revolution was necessary to arouse the masses of the people, to free them from the intellectual slavery of Capitalism, to bring them into that camp which was defending their interests. ”

“ When Kautsky asserts that the Commune of 1871 has found a warm corner, thanks to its spirit of humanity in the hearts of all who long for the liberation of mankind, the old man mistakes his own womanish heart for the dauntless one of the proletarian. It is not because of its weakness (which he calls humanity) that the Commune has become the symbol of proletarian aspirations, but because it was the first attempt of the proletariat to seize power. ”

“ Communism is a theory of revolution and therefore it can only be understood in its entire significance during a period of revolution. On this account we can see that in the long period of quiet development which preceded the era of revolution only a few keen intellects were in a position to comprehend the theory of Communism so completely and clearly as when, during the revolutionary epoch of rising Capitalism, it was born in the brains of those children of the period of storm and stress, in the brains of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. ”

“ The breathing space which his foreign policy gained for the revolution allowed it to organize itself, was also a breathing-space for the counter-revolution, which, under the shield of German Imperialism in the Ukraine and under the protection of the Entente in Siberia, organized more energetic attacks on Soviet Russia. Instead of effecting compromises with the matadors of Capitalism for the improvement of industry the proletariat State had to fight the Terror with all available means in order to protect the power of the working class—the fundamental condition for any kind of Socialization. ”

“ One might say: every Revolution is begun by the minority, the majority rallies to its aid while the revolution is going on, and so determines its victory. Were it not so, the dictatorship in a country like Russia, which possesses a proletarian minority, would not only be harmful as the Kautskys maintain, but in a country with a proletarian majority, to which the Kautskys graciously permit the dictatorship, it would be unnecessary. In these countries the capitalist class forms such a very small minority, that it would not be able to use weapons against the proletariat. ”

“ The independent working masses know that it is not enough to extort from their leaders a confession in favor of dictatorship, that it is necessary to have at the points—boxes on the proletarian railway system, representatives of the revolutionary proletariat whose eyes calmly perceive facts and whose hands do not tremble. A Soviet dictatorship with leaders who have not definitely broken mentally with the capitalist world, and who are not prepared to do what hard necessity demands—such a dictatorship can only be a dictatorship in appearance, and that means certain defeat. ”

“ The growing political reaction had the effect on the working class of a storm signal and showed them in all countries that not revolutionary Communism, but, on the contrary, the so-called "real" Reformism was a Utopia, not, to be sure, one that would give wings to the soul, that would stimulate the energies of the workers, that would make the journey of humanity seem shorter in the visions it presents, so that the sluggish ones might be encouraged to hasten their steps, but on the contrary one that would lame their stride, transforming them into creeping beasts. ”

“ Kautsky declares that when the leaders of the counter-revolution resorted to terrorist methods they were true to themselves, "because to them human life was so cheap as to be merely a means of furthering their own aims." "They do not renounce their principles when they sacrifice human life in order to retain their power, but the Bolsheviks can only do this when they become untrue to the principle of the sacredness of human life which they themselves have exalted and vindicated." ”

“ The first question of the Social Revolution which confronts the working class is this: When can the Social Revolution come? As Marxism showed the workers that the victory of Socialism is dependent on the development of the forces of production, a perverted conception became rooted in the ranks of the Marxists that the Social Revolution would only then become possible when Capitalism had the entire economic life of the nation in its grasp, when, so to say, it had divided it relentlessly into a small group of capitalists and oppressed proletariat. ”

“ Whoever has studied the history of revolutions, not from books like Kautsky's, but from great and original if also reactionary bourgeois sources, will have no hesitation in agreeing with Ranke when he says in his history of the English Revolution that great things must always be shaped by a strong will. The meaning of terrorism in the revolution is that the revolutionary class, even in the hour of greatest danger, shrinks from nothing in order to accomplish its will, and defends itself with all its might. ”

“ Just because the country has been unbelievably shattered through the war, Communism is the only way by which the workers can hope to emerge from the want and misery of the shattered capitalistic society. To forego beforehand the chance to organize this economic life in its own interest would mean to rush into capitalistic misery for fear that the inexperienced proletariat would be incapable of directing the main forces of national economic life concentrated by Capitalism. ”

“ The proletariat do not long for bloodshed; they know from historical experience that violence or the Terror never at any time nor place created new conditions of production, that it never produced a new system of society where economic development had not prepared the ground for it. The proletariat know that violence does not produce bread or coal, and does not build railways. ”

“ Capitalism leads to the bloodiest anarchy, to the destruction of the few cultural achievements which have been created, to the deepest misery of the masses and their literal enslavement, so that this lesson might be converted out of a theoretical thesis into a crying and burning certainty, at least in the minds of the front ranks of the working class. ”

“ It can win only if it exerts all its strength, and employs every means of defense. The leaders and the Press must denounce every weakness of the organism in order to call forth fresh efforts. Even where failure is due to objective obstacles and difficulties it is helpful to tell the masses that all these hinderances can be overcome. While the bourgeoisie and Social Democratic Press of Germany endeavors to conceal every form of corruption practiced by the State authorities, the Soviet Press ruthlessly lays bare the weaknesses of its own State machinery. ”