Chapter III.
MUST CAPITALISM BE REBUILT?
This latter group in general may be described as follows: Socialism, of course, has matured; capitalism has already produced within itself the forces of production which make the question of the Socialist revolution practical politics for to-day; but the war has destroyed everything and now we must adopt a new tone, we cannot now speak of the tasks of the Socialist revolution. The question is presented in this manner by none other than Karl Kautsky who has spoken about the enormous damage caused by the war and about the impossibility of establishing Socialism on the basis of post-war capitalism. Russian Social-Democrats also have presented the question in this manner, for example the well-known Menshevik Lieber. In the preface to his pamphlet "Social Revolution or Social Collapse," published in Kharkov in 1919, after carefully explaining that "unfortunately" he had lost the original manuscript of this pamphlet when he had to flee from the "Communist Okhrana" (Secret Service), he put forward the following arguments:
"I advanced the fundamental 'pessimistic' postulates developed in this lecture already in the period of the 'honeymoon' of our revolution. From the very first days of the Russian Revolution the features of its collapse from decay caused by the war were clearly revealed to me and the flitting will o' the wisps did not for a moment appear to me like revolutionary beacons."
