Page:Building Up Socialism - Nikolai Bukharin (1926).pdf/44

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BUILDING UP SOCIALISM

its temporary domination into prolonged Socialist dictatorship without direct State aid.

However much they may wriggle, and turn the similarity—speaking mildly—is positively striking. The position of Trotsky on the question of the possibility of constructing Socialism in our country (or, what amounts to the same thing, on the question of the character of our revolution) is nothing more or less than the Russian translation оf the Bauer Social-Democratic variation. That is why the fact became possible in the fight against the Leninist Central Committee of the Russian Bolsheviks, that Trotsky found himself in the same company with a man who recently acquired the deplorable reputation of renegade, Korsch and his friends. This honourable gentleman, who has been expiating his Communist sins by preaching a holy crusade against the Russian Revolution, has now also perceived, through the blessing of Kautsky, the bourgeois-peasant character of our revolution and is now announcing that the Russian Bolsheviks are cultivating the off-shoots of a new, American type of capitalism. What is there surprising about this? Since no proletarian State aid from the West is forthcoming, it is not surprising that the proletarian dictatorship is changing into something "far from proletarian"; it is not surprising that it is "running off" class rails, this is the elementary conclusion to be drawn from the Bauer-Trotsky premises. …

Having finished with Trotsky, we must examine the extremely peculiar variation of the "friendly" criticism of the Leninist point of, view of the character of our revolution: we have in mind the criticism of Lenin on the part of Zinoviev, Kamenev and others in the period of the October Revolution; the peculiarity of this criticism was evidenced in that